Cooked meat vs. Smoked meat

[T-shirt]

Just make smoked meat a fixed size project. Fine tuning the amounts can be solved later.

[Mr. Bones]

How about ya'll just open up a weapons shop and leave the smokers the hell alone.

[Sicofonte]

To make it fixed is a good idea (and lealistic)

Grilling meat (dung)
Output (fixed)
* 350 grams of smoked meat
Labour required
* 2 days
Required resources
* 400 grams of meat
* 150 grams of wood
Required tools
* none

This way, smoking meat would be comparable to grilling meat: fixed output (2 days), but more potent and more time and fuel efficient.

Smoker: Smoking meat
meat -> 400, wood -> 150 (.5 days) -> 350 smoked meat (16 meals)
16 / 2.5 = 6.4 meals / day

Small firepit: Grilling meat
meat -> 300, wood -> 200 (.67 days) -> 270 grilled meat (9.6 meals)
9,6 / 1.67 = 5.75 meals / day

How about ya'll just open up a weapons shop and leave the smokers the hell alone.

We want roleplaying, and diversity. Cantr is a roleplaying game. What's wrong with you?. Taverns should exist in Cantr, you CAN'T be against that.
The bore roleplayers (I, for example) can exist without the smoker. But the taverns can't exist with the smoker. Don't be selfish.

[Arlequin]

How about ya'll just open up a weapons shop and leave the smokers the hell alone.

Well, since famine is widespreadly regarded as an event too much undesirable for all cantr communities, even the most primitive ones, and it's practically banned through the current production rates, why don't we just remove food altogether?

The consensus seems to be that the struggle to build a crossbow is a fun event/quest, but struggling to earn your bread is bad event/quest and shall be kept away of Cantr.

This is basically illogical for Cantr in my opinion since pure RP fun is not about the quality or quantity of the items that are part of the quest, but the quest itself. I'd rather lose that kind of powergamers than go the way of powergaming games like Ultima, Ragnarok, Warcraft, etc.

But you got what you want. At least, I'm not trading again with food as long as hunger is not a real problem for characters that don't cooperate but for dumb sailors or travelers.

[sanchez]

Death is not guaranteed without a crossbow.

Forcing people to work harder for food is doing the opposite of what you say you want. Basic survival should be easy, "since pure RP fun", but there should be rewards for the people who choose to work. Like crossbows. This is not illogical. There are different types of players who enjoy the game in very different ways. This fact should be celebrated. More incentives for infrastructure development and industry, less punishment for the poor and lazy. Sell high quality and interesting foods in your tavern, but please don't ask to make the game harder and more tedious for everybody.

[Wolf]

... But you got what you want. At least, I'm not trading again with food as long as hunger is not a real problem for characters that don't cooperate but for dumb sailors or travelers.

Yes, dumb travellers and sailors... but where would most towns be if it weren't for them?
Trade would have been virtually non-existant, knowledge of other islands would be non-existant, and most of those great maps would not have been made if it weren't for dumb travellers that made anf updated them.
Then you'd not know where to get wood or salt, or magnesium, coal, limestone, hematite... or whatever else isn't native to your own little corner of the Cantr world.
Without those travellers, you'd never get past the level of having a loincloth, bone shield and bone bagh-nakh.
And a lot of places wouldn't have had half the population they had now, from travellers settling down.
Sounds to me like you are having a very narrow view on things, seeing only that which hinders your chars, but not that from the same source which aids your chars.

Edit: Eh, yeah, what Sanchez said... heh...
I really need to type a lot faster.

[T-shirt]

Sell high quality and interesting foods in your tavern, but please don't ask to make the game harder and more tedious for everybody.

There is no high quality food besides smoked meat. There are interesting foods, but they are too complicated to make and thus too expensive to be considered buying.

[Mr. Bones]

Even if you did eliminate smokers your chances at making money selling food is'nt good anyway since practically anybody can obtain food regardless of location. If smokers are gone, people would start drying dung more and cooking meat or gathering kilos of potatos or asparagus from neighboring towns. All you do by this is eliminate a popular source of food. I could support realistic manufacturing costs but I don't think the process should be altered just because it affects the buisness of tavern owners.

[Sicofonte]

Wolf, the "dumb travelers" were refering to a people that travels without food and starves. Not "dumb because they are travelers".


Sanchez, Wolf, RPing is not chating with the belly stuffed at easy.
In real RPing games, there is a varied realitywith which you can interact.
Food mechanics in Cantr makes absurd and absolutly counterproductive to roleplay a taverkeeper, and that is absolutly SAD.
The tavern is a place where you can have fun, try rare and delicious (or nauseating) dishes, and some beverages for sure.
Your characters can meet in the tavern, can meet for organizing something, or just for looking for row, if the tavernkeeper is not strong enough to throw you out of there.
That's RPing! Cantr need taverns and tavernkeepers!

The difficulty of the game has nothing to do with its RPing essence, but if it is not balanced some ways of RPing would be impossible.

To have a business five times in more than 200 days.... You can't keep RPing that.

The most powerful foods should require the most expensive or less accesible machines.


About gaining money selling food:

If you are in a forest, no raw food except animals, and you are an expert woodcutter, and an awkward cook. Would you buy 300 grs of smoked meat per 300 grs of wood?. Logically, your answer would be "yes". But in practice, no one buys it, there is not enough benefit I guess (nonsense), or it is due to the fact of having smokers in the ships.

[sanchez]

I agree smoked meat is too good. But if it's fixed, what will become the most popular food? Why are there so many battle axes and crossbows when there are interesting alternatives with negligible difference? Why are rakers and sloops so popular? The problem is, if we make things like subsistence that much harder, the people who are not interested in working are not going to become more inspired, and the people who are already working have better things to do.

[Arlequin]

It cuts a lot of roleplaying possibilities out of Cantr.

If "struggle or danger of death in undeveloped places" is the reason against turning expert cookers and/or indoor machines in the reliable way to produce either fast and highly caloric food, or at least non unhealthy food, then dangerous animals should be removed too. I've seen a whole colony anhilated by bears. Was that unfair? Struggling to live there anyways was more exciting than living among fluffy rabbits. If danger by animals was removed to don't harm certain locations, it would have ruined a lot of interesting situations.

And it isn't all about smokers. There are tons of non dramatic solutions to make food production more appealing, and I would like just to see one implemented:

- Campfires occasionally extinguish outdoors, or are ruined by rain.

- A sporadic disease from eating food cooked with dung that slows walking speed.

- Diet variety affects healing food efficiency.

- Enforcing the difference from expert cookers to awkard cookers when they aren't assisted by tools. (I could cook perfectly an elephant on 100 microwaves at once, but I wouldn't be able for my own life to smoke it perfectly on 100 smokers at once.)

- The character refuses to eat the same food during more than a whole year, it would starve ten days and then start eating it again (which actually makes food last longer, but your stomach will do annoying noises for a while).

- Insects and rats occasionaly ruin food stored outside containers or locked rooms (Cantr life is so predictable it's boring, really).

- Droughts and animal starvation.

What I ultimately mean is that food could have a part in a lot of exciting and unpredictable situations, and it doesn't. So basically you have to wait until some sort of violence outbreaks to see happening a real exciting crisis. Yawn!

[sanchez]

Some of us don't need a crisis. And you're wrong. It is too much to impose on everyone. It's a free and open game. Not all can log in every day. There should be opportunities for everyone to enjoy the game. I'm not trying to restrict anybody's rp. Why do you insist on hardship? There are plenty of other incentives for productivity. These things are not tied.

If you feel bored, it should be your problem, and not mine.

[Nakranoth]

Well, having a cook myself, I've noticed the trend to avoid buying food from the get-go. The only really big sales of food are healing, or else running it across the continent to where there is no natural foods. We need better incentives for varieties of foods.
Now, a possible way of being able to make this a good change without making it necessity: have toggle boxes on every food that set you to either eat/not eat it. If you ever run out of foods checked to eat, it would eat like it does now. Otherwise, it would eat a portion of each selected food (proportional to the current per day rates). Then, until next eat cycle, you would count as though you were 2% more skilled at everything per extra type of food eaten. Of course, that also means a charrie who hasn't eaten anything would be 2% less effectively skilled.
This adds a definite mechanical benefit to having a varied diet, without peanalizing current food levels. Makes taverns much more appealing without making life any harder or imbalancing anything too badly.

[DELGRAD]

Come on now.
I really do not care if it is "Cooked meat vs. Smoked meat".
Might as well include salted meat.
Smoked foods is number 1 food.
Salted food is tied with smoked.
Of those two foods one third of all of my characters eat them.
The rest eat tastier food they can make and or get.
Note the meals per day of labor. Does not include machine build time.
Wich happens to be the same.


smoked meat
smoker: 1100 wood, hammer, 1.5 days
350 smoked meat takes
400 meat
30 wood 300 grams a day
1 day collecting 300 wood
10 days smoking
3500 smoked meat
318.18 smoked meat made a day
159.09 day of food
14.46 meals made per day of labor



salted meat
salting barrel: 1800 wood, hammer, knife, 1.5 days
350 salted meat takes
400 meat
50 salt 250 grams a day
2 days collecting 500 salt
10 days salting
3500 salted meat
291.66 salted meat made a day
175 days of food
14.58 meals made per day of labor



Salting barrel makes more food than smoker.
Mess with smokers, then you must do same with salting barrels.
Then piss off all the smoked and salted meat eaters.
If you have a problem finding salt. Tough.

I do not expect the warmest of responses to this.

[sanchez]

Nobody is being forced to eat the most efficient food. There are dozens of foods available. This is not restricting RP. Put a little more effort into it.