The power of food

[YugoStrikesBack]

Right now the main engine that forces someone to listen to a society's rules in cantr is the use of force. Either you listen to what I say, or I use force you to.

However, there are other real life ways that people can become convinced to want to do something for someone that are largely neglected. For example, hunger.

Right now it's so easy for a person to get food it's almost ridiculous. Seriously I'm gonna ask Seko to give me a stat to prove this point. I bet there is more food in this game to feed all people of Cantr for the next year at least.

We have to start encouraging people to do work for a civilization due to hunger. Let's make food more difficult to attain. Maybe have roaming periods where a person can not gather food due to famine or weather in the town, as well as consider rotting of raw foods or unsalted foods inside of buildings.

Furthermore, there are also incentives we could use with food to entice people even more to fall in line with a society. For example, we could allow certain food to help a person become stronger, or maybe allow certain food to help a person's endurance in regards to how tired they become.

Regardless of the route the staff choose to take this however, the staff must understand that there are three basic needs that drive the real life mind of a person. Food, water, and shelter. These three needs, combined with the need for security, helped form the beginning of civilization. While water and shelter are not big necessities in the game, food is. So maybe Cantr should consider forcing people to have to work together more to stave off hunger.

[Piscator]

I agree completely that raw foods should be harder to gather. Actually, our numbers are pretty fucked up. A newspawn without tools can easily feed 7 other people, with a harvester it's already 39 people. This means that baking potatoes (which generates food for 9 people) actually is a complete waste of time if you have a harvester.

I would have started developing a reform plan months ago, if it wasn't such a huge task. Everything is connected with anything, so changing one value will change twenty others.

[Arenti]

I agree completely that raw foods should be harder to gather. Actually, our numbers are pretty fucked up. A newspawn without tools can easily feed 7 other people, with a harvester it's already 39 people. This means that baking potatoes (which generates food for 9 people) actually is a complete waste of time if you have a harvester.

I would have started developing a reform plan months ago, if it wasn't such a huge task. Everything is connected with anything, so changing one value will change twenty others.

True towns with an harvester will not really bother about cooking food except to sell it to forests/ mountains/ deserts.

[EchoMan]

It's also quite common to cook food and hand it to people who are going away to gather resources and what not.

Also in some larger towns without gatherable food cooking can be essential for survival.

[SekoETC]

We already have a model in herb growing so I suggest vegetables and certain fruit that can be gathered in nature should be considered wild and they would only give you enough to feed you say, two days for one day of gathering. Farms and gardens could then be added as machines, you use wild vegetables as seeds and the projects will have a fixed length of up to 20 days, maybe 10. It would be kind of neat if it was automatic with manual assistance but adding workers affected the amount of outcome instead of the duration of the project. You plant the seeds (potatoes/other vegetable/fruit), maybe add some fertilizer (there could be two different projects, one with fertilizer and one without, and if you leave it growing wild, you wouldn't get much more than if you'd spent those days gathering raw potatoes, while the more workers you got on it (up to a point = the max workers field) the more outcome it would yield in the end. But this would require coding. The project would have a fixed duration but there should be a percentage to reflect how well the field is tended. There could also be different sized farms and gardens, and the project sizes in addition to the with or without fertilizer option could be seed the whole field, seed half or seed a quarter. Since if you have less workers than taking care of a full field would require, it's better for you to take care of one slice of the field well than take care of the whole field poorly.

[Tincho]

Is it possible that a character needs a tractor to harvest vegetables in a large field?

[Piscator]

I don't think we need fields unless depletion of natural resources is implemented.

Severly reducing natural gathering rates is a good idea though.

[abandoned]

When high rot rates for raw food inside buildings would be added, it would encourage characters to cook or in some other way prepare their food, and at the same time would avoid the accumulation of large piles for storage and also get rid of existing ones. If the high gathering rate of the harvest-machines stayes untouched, big towns which really need that large amounts per day could still be fed by few, but since there would be no way of effectivly storing the raw food, the town would somehow depend on the food gatherers. Smaller towns could alsy satisfy their needs for food - but because of the rotting - have to harvest more frequently.

Well, my suggestion would somehow privilege big towns (because they can actually eat the large amounts of food before it rots) but on the other side sets all sizes of towns on an equal level because they both have to keep an eye on their food supplies and will maybe encourage them to grow. (well, of course just if they have some kind of harvester...)
(maybe its time to add more to the "electronics"-branch... a fridge ?^^)

[Tincho]

I think the food stored in a container should not deteriorate.

[AlchemicRaker]

Maybe containers can have varying protection rates? (A simple solution for now). A 100% container would stop all rot, while lesser containers would only decrease the natural rotting by 50% or perhaps even 0%.

- Natso

[Snake_byte]

Severly reducing natural gathering rates is a good idea though.

Then you would also need to severly raise many efficiencies of both, prepared nourishing foods and healing foods. No?

[Piscator]

No, why? Gathering rates are so much out of proportion that hardly any compensation should be necessary. If we just halfed the gathering rates of vegetables (in particular the nourishing varieties) food production would probably still be too easy.

[returner]

I think we've given the Cantr world a boost up to modernity, when speaking in terms of society. No one wants to play the nitty gritty painful time-wasting development stages (ie inventing houses, taking forever to build tools, etc). Now we are at a stage where we can start slowing down the ease of things and add more and more realism.. such as this suggestion.

I fully endorse this suggestion, as part of the Unofficial member for Simulation and Society Revolution, also known as USSR. (or UMSSR if you want to be fussy)

[YugoStrikesBack]

In addition to the rate of rot, we should also discuss my second part of the post, making food even more of a commodity
.
The way I see it, we could use these herbs and spices and other foods to do more than just decrease tiredness/damage. There are just so many possibilities.

We could make "energy" drinks that temporarily increases a person's endurance.

"Protein" drinks that slightly increases a person's strength permanently (say the equivalent of one spar hit at 0% tiredness).

Hell even make drinks that can make a person look younger.

[EchoMan]

I think we've given the Cantr world a boost up to modernity, when speaking in terms of society. No one wants to play the nitty gritty painful time-wasting development stages (ie inventing houses, taking forever to build tools, etc). Now we are at a stage where we can start slowing down the ease of things and add more and more realism.. such as this suggestion.

I fully endorse this suggestion, as part of the Unofficial member for Simulation and Society Revolution, also known as USSR. (or UMSSR if you want to be fussy)

That's true for some of the older areas. At the moment, though, we are introducing the Lojban and Italian language groups, and they will start from scratch (more or less). To say that Cantr is "modern" is a bit ignorant to the smaller (and coming) language groups imho.