What are your thoughts on the Hunger / Thirst rates?
Jackalope
Join Date: 2015-03-13 Member: 202057Members
Join Date: 2015-03-13 Member: 202057Members
Hey guys I've been playing exclusively on Survival Mode since I bought this game. I enjoy the survival aspect, but it has always seemed like the thirst and hunger rates have been a little high. Today I conducted a bit of an experiment to find out how much material it took to stay alive for an hour of game play. I cooked up a bunch of peepers and disinfected water.
Peepers are a moderately good food source. Giving 30 units of food and 5 units of water. 3 peepers almost fill up the food bar. While exploring, it took about 20 minutes from completely full food bar for it to drain to 0. Extrapolating this over an hour, it would take 9 peepers per hour to prevent starvation.
Yes, i know spade fish a slightly better food source, but i used peepers as they are the best fish available to starting players.
Disinfected water provides 30 units. Along with the bit of water from eating fish, it takes 3 bottles of water to fill the hydration meter. It takes about 30 minutes for the hydration meeter to go from 100 to 0. Surprisingly the hydration meeter drains at two thirds the speed of the hunger meter. If drinking distilled water, you must use 6 bottles per hour.
If you cook air bladders into water in yields 15 water, but it takes a about 10 bladders to survive for an hour. They just seem to take longer to find than the equivalent materials for disinfected water.
If you play survival mode you probably see the problem here, each bit of food or water requires 1 piece of salt. This means, using this method you need to collect 15 chunks of salt in a hour, every hour. Salt is pretty easy to find pretty much everywhere but does not seem to respawn, which could cause issues in longer games.
Seems to me that the hunger and thirst rate could be tuned down a bit. Maybe 30%. It seems like i spend a large portion of my time just hunting salt. Maybe require 10 salt per hour instead of 15.
Another option would be to offer better food sources that don't need salt to prepare. Sushi anyone?
While this is manageable now, as they continue to implement power consumption you would need to track down enough battery and cell parts to keep all of the subs, the base and tools powered. I'm afraid this might not leave time for much else.
Short summary if you are too lazy to read this:
Food bar drains in 20 min. Thirst drains in 30 min. If you eat peepers and drink disinfected water, you need 15 chunks of salt every hour. Seems like too much.
Maybe lower thirst and hunger rates.
SO WHAT DO YOU THINK? Do you think hunger and thirst rates are too high? like em how they are? want them to be higher? Prefer to play on freedom mode and think I'm a masochist for continuing to play survival mode? Let me know!
EDITED for ACCURACY
PS. Dev's if your reading this, thanks for all your hard work on this game. This game is refreshingly unique and shows a huge amount of potential. Can't wait to get my hands on the feature complete version.
Peepers are a moderately good food source. Giving 30 units of food and 5 units of water. 3 peepers almost fill up the food bar. While exploring, it took about 20 minutes from completely full food bar for it to drain to 0. Extrapolating this over an hour, it would take 9 peepers per hour to prevent starvation.
Yes, i know spade fish a slightly better food source, but i used peepers as they are the best fish available to starting players.
Disinfected water provides 30 units. Along with the bit of water from eating fish, it takes 3 bottles of water to fill the hydration meter. It takes about 30 minutes for the hydration meeter to go from 100 to 0. Surprisingly the hydration meeter drains at two thirds the speed of the hunger meter. If drinking distilled water, you must use 6 bottles per hour.
If you cook air bladders into water in yields 15 water, but it takes a about 10 bladders to survive for an hour. They just seem to take longer to find than the equivalent materials for disinfected water.
If you play survival mode you probably see the problem here, each bit of food or water requires 1 piece of salt. This means, using this method you need to collect 15 chunks of salt in a hour, every hour. Salt is pretty easy to find pretty much everywhere but does not seem to respawn, which could cause issues in longer games.
Seems to me that the hunger and thirst rate could be tuned down a bit. Maybe 30%. It seems like i spend a large portion of my time just hunting salt. Maybe require 10 salt per hour instead of 15.
Another option would be to offer better food sources that don't need salt to prepare. Sushi anyone?
While this is manageable now, as they continue to implement power consumption you would need to track down enough battery and cell parts to keep all of the subs, the base and tools powered. I'm afraid this might not leave time for much else.
Short summary if you are too lazy to read this:
Food bar drains in 20 min. Thirst drains in 30 min. If you eat peepers and drink disinfected water, you need 15 chunks of salt every hour. Seems like too much.
Maybe lower thirst and hunger rates.
SO WHAT DO YOU THINK? Do you think hunger and thirst rates are too high? like em how they are? want them to be higher? Prefer to play on freedom mode and think I'm a masochist for continuing to play survival mode? Let me know!
EDITED for ACCURACY
PS. Dev's if your reading this, thanks for all your hard work on this game. This game is refreshingly unique and shows a huge amount of potential. Can't wait to get my hands on the feature complete version.
Comments
I'd advise playing on freedom mode until they start doing some balancing around survival when they have more of the variables implemented to mess with
My feeling is that it is perhaps a tad harsh, but also that "Survival" should have some teeth, or else what's the point of including it?
Are you sure that water takes twice as long to deplete? It shouldn't be (see attached code and constants).
I was almost certain the water ticked down about half as quickly as the food. I filled both bars at the same time. when the food bar ran out the water bar was at 47%. I made a point not to drink anything until the bar ran out until this point. But i could double check. It's hard to argue against the config files. I may have clicked on a water by accident while sorting through inventory.
I agree there should be some challenge to survival mode, catching fish to eat can be a lot of fun, but being tied to a finite source of salt can feel a little limiting and frustrating at times when trying to find a spot that i haven't picked clean. Are you considering any alternatives to using salt for everything food related?
EDIT: Looks like i managed to mess up my initial test. Ran the test again. Food runs out in about 20, water in about 30. Sorry to make you dig through code on a clerical error. Edited my original post a bit
The game its going great so far thats my greates concern for survival mode but i know the developers will add up more things to balance this issue with further updates.
Also looks like salt spawns in the deep ocean pretty frequently too. Not sure why i though otherwise.
Here I go jumping to conclusions after one trial run. My high school physics teacher would not approve haha
So here is a suggestion add 3 parts for the sea bases and 2 for the large sub. and a fish farm
the sea base parts would be
sea water filter, this would be built onto a wall of a sea base and would provide 3 salt per 20 minutes draining 1% power per 10 minutes. (if connected to a generator with one power core)
sea water purifier, this would be an upgrade to the filter allowing it to purify one unit of water per 10 minutes, this would double the power drain.
seaweed/kelp farm, this would require plants, but the objective is simple this part would grow plants which can be used to create low grade food, or that can be combined with fish for food that can fill upto 75% the hunger bar. (though the higher grade the food the less hydration it gives in fact the highest grade would lower hydration)
sub parts
skimmer, a net that is dragged behind the sub, catches any small fish that come in contact with it, and "sticks" them to the net. larger fish will break the net requiring the player to repair it, larger fish will attack the net to get smaller fish.
sea water filter, basicly the low grade filter for the base provides salt, can be upgraded for the water production as well.
other
fish farm... basicly this: http://www.springwise.com/img/uploads/2012/08/kampachi.jpg would require the player to put atleast 5 of a fish in it at which point they would grow in the farm, useful for gathering food that you don't need to hunt for, it would be hatch access like the sea bases, and would require a tether point to be built first. if built deep down larger fish will destroy it to eat the smaller fish.
sorry idea spam, but over all the hunger system is good jsut needs sustainability focused on. I doubt it will be soon but it needs to happen before the larger base parts are done cause with out a way to sustain a location building and protecting a base for exploration is pointless.
Great ideas!! I'm Just a bit neutral with having the Nets, not sure why, it's just a bit strange... But the Water Filter/Purifier and the Farms would be awesome; the Water Purifier would be a good reason for having a base instead of just living in the cyclops!
You always have a lot of great ideas. Using new technology to make food and water easier inside sea bases could make survival a lot less tedious. You may have already had this in mind, but I don't think there should be any free lunch so to speak. Maybe the salt filters would have to be changed every so often, nets could be repaired, and nutrient paste could be made to feed farmed fish and plants. I think its important never to eliminate game play with survival mode, just transition into something more time and resource efficient as the game progresses.
Also I tend to agree the rates fall on the fast side, and it can become a bit tedious spending half of our time scavenging for food/water.
Edit:
As for the hunger/thirst rates, what about a variable decrease ratio?
For example:
-Have the hunger/thirst rates decrease at about 60% slower then current default when fully healthy, and inactive. (using the sea glide, a sub, standing around crafting etc..)
-Drain at the normal rate (or maybe 20-30% slower than current default?) when exerting ones self. (swimming with/out fins, harvesting resources, fighting, etc..)
-When injured have the hunger/thirst rate decrease 20%-50% faster than current default? (the lower your health the faster the decrease.)
This would help represent the higher caloric intake requirement when exercising or healing from injury and reward players who are careful and make smart use of their available tools.
That said, no survival game ever left food/water needs as an unmitigable focus. Don't Starve has farms and a diverse array of food sources. They may not be easy, but they are there and they don't act as a tether for gameplay. Players need to be able to source food and water in most biomes if you want them to focus on something besides 'Not Starving'. It doesn't mean they have to be fully self sufficient, just more efficient so they can focus on actually playing the game.
And the food meter easily decreases about 2-3x faster than water. Which is fine. I'm in the freaking ocean, not baking on a raft like a potato chip.
I do like and agree with the idea of a desalination machine for bases (and Cyclops possibly) rather than the rather unrealistic "disinfected water" at the Fabricator that wouldn't remove the salt content of sea water. (I also think the Fabricator is generally overpowered, but that is another topic entirely.) I would also like to see more complicated recipes, perhaps that involve plant as well as fish ingredients.
Salt availability is definitely a problem in longer plays, it is available in the deeper biomes, but if it respawns, it does so very slowly, and becomes quite scarce over time. A desalination machine might assist with this also, producing a small amount of salt, perhaps something like 10 units of production produces 6-8 water and 2-4 salt.
I also like the idea of small-scale gardening/farming, something you can set-up then leave while you do other things, hydroponics or kelp-tanks, fish traps; I like those floating fish-farms things, if you didn't want them to actually produce fish, they could perhaps be holding tanks for fish you catch/trap.
The idea, as I think was said above, shouldn't be full self-sufficiency detached from the environment, and it should be a challenge, but food and water shouldn't be a full-time concern, or it becomes frustrating quite quickly. And there is so much potential in expanding the cooking/gardening/farming recipes and tech that it should definitely be developed further than it is.
Also I'm not sure if it's a mechanic or maybe it got changed recently (though the change seemed to happen while in game), but I initially would get x9 creepvine morsels but after playing for a good 2 hours and pretty much only eating this stuff, I started only getting x4 morsels out of each creepvine before it would vanish to indicate it was used up. Anyone know what the case is?
I definitely agree though if it wasn't for creepvine, that I would be spending way to much time just keeping my food and water levels up and I'd barely get a chance to explore even just the shallower areas close to the life raft starting area.
I think while on this topic the power discharge rate could also use a slight tweak as I can see and have started to experience the same issue here, where gathering the resources to keep even just the Cyclops powered ends up becoming a pretty big portion of your gameplay time. Together with food and water, it's a very big time sink when I'd rather be exploring and finding a place to start building my first base
- Hyp3rion
Hmmm sorry, I made a mistake... It's an alien world so the rotation of the planet can be much more faster than ours. So as it is, seems realistic ^^
Thats a solid suggestion. I'd love to see this implemented too.The decreased hunger rate while using a vehicle would be offset by the battery power consumed to move around, or using the constructor. A much needed, if subtle bit of game play balance.
I noticed that too. Sometimes i get 7 parts, sometimes 9, and i think (not sure though) i got more that 10 few times. Maybe the size of creepvine dictates the the number of morsels.
I like survival mode and food/water management and i think it is important aspect of this game BUT.. While it is fun at the beginning, it gets tedious later.
I like to think of this game is in stages. Here are my thougts.
When we start the game, collecting food and water is quite a big part of gameplay. This is logical, we are starting in the life pod in the middle of the ocean, trying to survive, exploring our closest surroundings, maybe constructing first few basic tools.. Consolidating our position, so to say. This is the first stage of the game.
The second stage is exploration. We are building constructor, then our first Seamoth, few advanced tools.. We are learning flora and fauna, what can we eat, what is dangerous, how they interact with us, how they behave at day and how at night. We can invent some creative ways of hunting fish (gravsphere, current generator), or not so creative but efficient (stasis rifle). We start to go further of our life pod and explore new biomes, new species there, new materials etc. Food/Water management is still issue but it is little easier since we discover that Peeper and Spadefish are the most nutritive. We also find salt so we can cook and make disinfected water. So we made some progress. So far so good.
But.. Then comes the third stage. Expansion and deep sea exploration. We are building Cyclops, seabase(s), we are gathering resources big time, building all kinds of equipment and tools, upgrades, lockers etc.. We also start to explore depths that were unreachable to us before. The game evolves quite a bit. But, is food/water management improved too? No.
For me this does not make any sense. I have big submarine, seabase, nanotechnology devices, all kind of things, but i still have to chase fish every time i need food, like i just started game. Not to mention salt collecting.
It is not logical. I understand that logic and reality has to be bended in games. For instance in rl oxygen tanks have much more capacity but in game that would take away the excitement. But still, i was given technology to build island given enough time (terraformer), but at the same time i have to chase fish in order not to starve. It is ridiculous.
Gameplay wise, this also hurt late game since it takes away huge chunks of time. It is quite ok in first few stages of the game, but since the game evolves later i just don't have time to do this over and over again. Game also introduce new factor and that is energy.
So i have to change batteries, power cells, (farm materials for them too), i am building my base which is 180m deep, going up to Safe Shallows to farm quartz (6 per window, so if i need 8 windows, you do the math), then returning to 180m deep, Cyclops is burning trough power fast, also i need to repair it with welder, take care of my increased oxygen consumption, take care of predators and on top of that i need 6 Spadefish and 12 salts per hour for food and water.
I like that i have to take care about lots of stuff, this makes game rich and interesting but as are new things introduced, some of the old should be suspended in order not to make player overburdened. I find myself spending more time in chasing Spadefish and searching salts then anything else.
I do not think that decreasing hunger/thirst rate is good idea. It would help at late stages but would also make first few stages of the game too easy since in the beginning it is important factor not to starve.
Maybe introducing new, more complex recipes mid game that would give more food and water.
Very good ideas.
These are my thoughts too. I spent some time in testing and yes, no mater what you do, or do not do, your hunger/thirst rates are the same. I hope they will change this.
There are lots of good suggestions, water purifier, farms, fish traps.. Maybe some kind of synth food? Rain collecting devices if they introduce weather? In the end it does not mater witch one will be implemented. It does mater that something gets implemented so we can enjoy in our exploration and bases without being forced to chase fish half of the time.
I think that Peepers and Spadefishes would also approve addition of some new food source .
Anyway, sorry for this wall.
Maybe it's also relative to the height at which you harvest the creepvine, as I'm mostly getting it from the top now as I navigate around in the Cyclops where before I would get it from further down, near the base after getting there in the Seamoth or Seaglide while also hunting for resources. Will have to test this out.
- Hyp3rion
It looks like theres some new tech in the works thats going to allow us to grow and alter plants in the future. Found a model of something called a botanical analysis machine on one of the modeler's sketchfab accounts.
( https://sketchfab.com/models/b9f056e02f134ef5bab67877c0f30650 )
Looks pretty cool, my theory is that its going to be salvage from the crashed ship in the next update, but I haven't heard anything official on it yet.
At the moment, yes, hunger and thirst rates are too harsh. But it's not a matter of difficulty, rather, it's a matter of tedium.
While subnautica is a beautiful game even in it's current state, what surviving boils down to right now is this:
-Hunger is dealt with by swimming around and catching a few fish by hand.
-Thirst is solved by grinding some coral and salt or catch a few more fish (airsacks).
Neither of these two things are very interesting to do and in fact can be quite boring. Fish is easy to catch, if time consuming, and gathering abundant and static resources has never been an interesting thing do to, outside of maybe provoding a reason to explore, which doesn't apply in this case (both coral and salt are plentiful and found mainly in the starting area).
What I mean by this is that either these two realtively boring and mundane tasks should be far less time consuming (and therefore either hunger and thirst should deplete at a much slower rate or food and water should replenish them even more), or both (but mainly gathering food) should be made more interesting, therefore making them something that the player actively wants to be involved in.
Perhaps a fishing system? Perhaps making fish harder to catch by hand, requiring the player to use ambush tactics, baits and/or specialized tools?
Personally, I would prefer if the latter was implemented but I realize that it's also the more difficult and time consuming option.
I hope I've made myself sufficently clear and that my input is useful.
Also, am I missing something or is there a reason to make cured food (fish+salt) over just making regular cooked food (just the fish)? I know cured food doesn't degrade, which could be useful if one is taking a long trip in the Cyclops and wants to limit power usage during the trip, but it seems to me it's better to keep the fish uncooked until it's needed. Cook and use immediately after. It's not like solar power costs anything. So when I notice hunger is getting a little low, I swim out and grab a few fishes at once. Since they don't even need to be kept in an aquarium right now (which would be a neat change to make), I just throw them into lockers.
That's what I'm doing in my current save and I have more salt than I know what to do with.
My thoughts for hunger/thirst right now are that aside from maybe having the decay rate be reduced or at least be tweakable by the player, the mechanic as it affects the early-game is in a pretty good spot. That being said, I'd love there to be more end-game ways to deal with hunger/thirst or vastly reduce the player driven action to deal with them. And by that I mean: better craftable food/water, machines or modules to produce renewable food/water, or equipment to reduce the decay of hunger/thirst. The stillsuit already exists as a means to accomplish the third point (for thirst only).
its not that finding food is hard ... its just turns kinda tedious after a while since food and water are easy to find its the frequency of eating/drinking that is very annoying