Herbal Mixtures that increase Work Effectiveness

[Cogliostro]

Drinking such an apothecary mixture temporarily makes a character work projects faster than usual.

Why this is attractive: Current apothecary mixtures are capable only of healing damage and restoring energy, both of which are purely combat-related applications. Because we have a goofy combat system that is apparently set up to encourage everyone to just forget about combat altogether, the whole aspect of the gameplay connected to collecting herbs and making mixtures from them is also rendered useless. So, useful peaceful applications of herbal mixtures are an absolute necessity for this part of the game to work better.

[SekoETC]

If tiredness from projects was increased drastically then people could drink tea and such to get back to the status quo and it wouldn't require any sort of a new mechanic. I think life was more interesting during that brief period when people were actually forced to rest every few days or their tiredness would get to 100%. Then the whole thing got nerfed. If people were upset about the overall decrease in efficiency then project advancing speed could be multiplied to match the decrease caused by tiredness, so that overall the efficiency would remain the same but it would be improved for people who drink energy increasing liquids.

[Cogliostro]

That's an interesting twist for sure. Do you see your idea necessarily breaking the currently widespread practice of just leaving a character on a gathering job for months and years realtime? I'm asking because I'm not that certain if that practice deserves to be nerfed or allowed to continue as it's always been done like that.

[AlchemicRaker]

I like what Seko has said. I think it would be nice if maybe ALL tiredness was increased by 5% of what it is now. Using herbs could increase efficiency by 20%? and it would increase your tiredness by 40% at the same time. So, using herbs means you'll really want to rest more often too. So its something like... getting a bonus now that you'll have to make up for later by resting.

[SekoETC]

I'm not quite sure what you mean. If it would increase tiredness and work efficiency at the same time, they would cancel each other out, unless tiredness was greater in which case it would make you perform worse, not better.

[AlchemicRaker]

Well, what I mean is... you increase in efficiency, so you make progress on your project faster. But you ALSO get tired faster. So the end result is that you get results sooner, but at the end you will still have gotten a lot tired. When you work on something normally (over a long time) most of the tiredness is negated. But if you do all the work at once, and get all the tiredness at once, you are forced to rest after working so quickly.

- Natso

[Cogliostro]

Natso, that's related to food toxicity effects which we can look at later as an additional feature...

What bothers me though is that (as I understand) going by Seko's awesome tiredness idea, what would unfortunately happen is that chars placed on 20+ day projects would become tired out by around day 3 or so, and after this their whole work effectiveness would get fubar and plummet. This behaviour would make it so that you can't set your chars to gather or make a lot of something, while you the player are away on vacation or taking a temp break from Cantr.

I am not sure that's a good thing to do, nerfing all sleep-workers like that. What does everyone think?

[Doug R.]

I'm definitely anti-sleep-worker nerfing.

It might be enough to make it so that you don't rest unless you're either actually resting or doing nothing. That way, hyper characters would eventually accumulate a lot of tiredness. I also agree with raising the tiredness across the board (except for combat).