Food changes

[Jur Schagen]

Allright, it has been a while since the last player riot, so we're giving you every chance to start one once more! After this horrible idea of a location name amnesia, we're gonna balance the food system too.

The first step will sound attractive - over the next few weeks, you will see a gradual increase of the gathering rates of most raw foods. After those weeks, however, comes the sour in too. You'll simply need more raw foods on a daily basis. Then the gathering rate will stop increasing, but the feeding rates will keep climbing for a while.

The net effect on the gathering/nutrition ratio for the benchmark food, raw potatoes, will be nil; however, the impact on inventories will be that you will require twice as much inventory room to carry around with you. This may not be much of a problem for townsfolk with storages available, but travellers will find they need more inventory room if they eat raw food.

Alongside that, we're also doing a little balancing between various raw food types. Carrots and spinach in particular, will be less of a super-food as they are nowadays. Who farms for potatoes when carrots are available? Well, we might see that change, later on.

The existing prepared foods are left untouched; and apart from that, new ways to cook food will be implemented over the coming period. This will make prepared food more attractive, especially for travellers.

All these changes will take place in a gradual way, over a period of 15 weeks, or over five Cantr years. Changes will start end october/early november.

Please note that existing food supplies (storage and inventory) will be left untouched, which will mean inflation for those.

Okay, rant away. It would be nice to see an "I like this" message every once in a while too, though...

Jur.

[Camino]

I like this.

[Bear]

I like this

[formerly known as hf]

I like the idea (which is to give more point to puuting effort into preparing foods I'm guessing?)

I'm only half convinced though - I think maybe it's from the wrong angle - rather than making raw foods less nutritious and increasing the use of prepared foods that way - I think prepared foods should have been made more nutritious, and raw foods left alone.

This way it makes things more difficult for all - the other way it'd just have made things easier for the travellers with the equipment to prepare food, and left it the same (which is already quite difficult) for poor newspawns...

Although, it does give an incentive for every character to start preparing foods - wether they travel or not - which is something I do like the sound of...

[Agar]

I like this idea ... but the order of implementation seems backwards to me.

The part of this that will have the hardest time becoming functional is the new ways to cook things. By new ways, I hope you mean some other way to cook besides the existing wood, coal, gas, and salt. If you're simply adding projects like baking potatoes to the existing cooking machines, it will make little difference, as almost all the cooking machines need iron in their construstion or the tools to construct them with.

I would like this idea more if the new ways to prepare food were sorted out first, then the rates of gather and then eating were adjusted.

Anyone else feel this way?

[Cantryjczyk]

I like this

[Surly]

Now why is it that you implement this side of my idea, but not the other side? There was a distinct reason why I suggested it in tandem with another idea...

*sighs*

Surprisingly enough, I like it. Mainly because I came up with it... (even if someone else in RD did also, doesn't change the fact I came up with it on my own...)

But, we need more wood. And greater diversity in resources... but one thing at a time.

[Jur Schagen]

Now why is it that you implement this side of my idea, but not the other side? There was a distinct reason why I suggested it in tandem with another idea...

Could you point me there, Sur?

Agar: yes, cooking will be possible on an alternative fuel.

Farmer: because we don't want to make food virtually weightless... it wouldn't be good to feed on 10g of cooked meat or so.

[wichita]

The reason that cooked foods are not being made more nutritious is because many are already at a very low level of grams eaten per day. The lowest we can push it is to 1 gram per day, so it isn't very mathematically reasonable to go that direction. The rate increase has also been planned to avoid inducing mass starvation in the less developed areas. We are trying to keep the players in mind here, I promise!

New prep methods that do not require wood for cooking are also being developed. Most notably, there are a few ideas for barley that will hopefully hit the scene soner than later (trust me, I am trying to getthe project finished up ) In case they have been overlooked, though, coal ovens do exist, for areas that have access to that resource instead of wood.

Might I take this time to advertise the drying rack, a much ignored piece of machinery that should be good for preparing meat in wood restricted areas. (Yes I know it requires wood to build, but if you look at the amount, most places should be able to manage a one time resource run for materials and then they will be set in beef jerky for life. Hilloi is in the middle of Kansas after all, so it is appropriate. )

We have also been working on improving the efficiency of fishing so that it may become a viable Cantrian industry and food source.

But the big motivation here is to make food more bulky, not so much more difficult to get. A year's worth of potatoes will move from taking up 13% of your inventory space to 26% of your space; carrots from 5% to 10% of the space; while bread will still take up 5% and cooked meat will require only 3%. The term travelling food should therefore take on greater meaning now, and even in larger towns, storage space should possibly begin to become a factor. I personally would love to see bakers and chefs finally being able to survive all across Cantr not only for roleplaying flavor, but also as an important role in societies. But with this strategy in hand, hopefully we are not forcing this specialization to occur, can leave that up to the players, and can avoid turning this into just another horribly unpopular and failed implementation.

[Chris Johnson]

Might I take this time to advertise the drying rack, a much ignored piece of machinery that should be good for preparing meat in wood restricted areas.

Currently the drying rack doesn't just require wood to build but also string - which cannot be made any more (cotton string and hemp string are both manufacturable but can't be used to build a drying rack) .
So a nice suggestion but it currently can't be built

[colonel]

*Drops the gloves and hits wichita in the back of the head.* Way to go silly... *Gets the fire hose* BACK! BACK I say, don't make me use this people!



I like the idea and think that we are all going to be happy with the changes. HA HA.

[Agar]

Did some research on bread, and I'll post it over in the suggstions, and link it back here so as to not Hijack the thread.

But basically, something that will help bread production in cantr is to make the bread cycle be available to the poor. Both the Millstone and the Manual Grain Grinder need iron in thier tools, and even if the mortar and pestle needs iron, if it can even be used to make anything bread needs.

I know some people like to rant about how iron isn't that hard to make, and in general, it's not I agree, but there are spots where it is something that would take years of character time and struggle to get some iron, and most newspawns can't make the journey while starving.

So to make bakeries more plausable, come over and comment on this idea.

[wulf]

It might be a good time to fix the string thing then! Any particular reason for not allowing hemp and cotton string to work or is it just a case of plugging a couple of extra rows into the database?

Wulf

[Yoldash]

I like this..

[Wolf]

Interesting, interesting... luckily this occurs at around a time when most of my chars are finding their way around, so to say, so they could survive.
Of course, there's two or three chars that are probably wanting to put a voodoo-curse on their player now for not letting them high-tail it out of those poor regions they spawned in, as soon as they spawned... lol...
But I can understand how it would be illogical to transform salt and stone into edible stuff just because those happen to be the only resources in certain areas, it would upset a lot of folks.
Oh well, maybe those chars will make it to other places just in time to be burried which would leave me with more time for the other chars.