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RNC 1: Food Expiration


Sporadic
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The Remove Nexus Chronicles

On food expiration and seasons

 

This is my ramblings and thoughts while working on what I believe is the top priority for LotC right now: Remove Nexus.

 

Food expiration has never been a popular feature. It is painful for players to have to collect food every 2 days and confusing as well as annoying for new players. In order to make it less painful, various features such as salt, coolboxes and most recently /bread was added. That last one, /bread, is so convenient it completely negates expirations and, in fact, the need to gather food at all.

 

So why even have food expirations?

 

Telanir set out around 4.0 to have a way to make farming useful. For example, learning magic is cool and a whole team is dedicated to making it special. But being a farmer is being a nobody. Nobody really needs other people to get food for them.

 

So, on the one hand, the farmer is a staple for medieval RP and people that choose to play one should feel rewarded in RP.

On the other, not having food is so annoying it kills RP for the people being hungry.

 

Right now food expirations don't work, but I'm wondering if they even could work? Right now here's some of the paths to take post-Nexus:

  • Make food gathering vanilla. It would be easy and everybody could do it. We could make farmer useful by creating a few "special" crops which have other purposes.
    Pros: Easy for newbies, vanilla, simple. Cons: Have to come up with new ways to make farming useful (generally this is done through PvP benefits which people also don't like)
  • Tie expiration dates to the Seasons mechanic. Food expiration would be greatly increased to be less annoying, but still expire every IRL week so that every RP "year" farmest must harvest their crops to feed people during the winter.
    Pros: Immersive. Ties in with seasons and winter which are popular mechanics. Cons: You will need to learn about the LotC calendar and timekeeping.
  • Don't have expirations, but restrict the amount of food that can be harvested by non-farmers.
    Pros: mechanically simple. Very easy to understand. No burden of learning plugins. Cons: Hard for devs to balance. Hard for players to get food which will disadvantage newbies and less active players.

 

I might do more of these. let me know what you think.

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In order to revive farming: you need to give food crops actual value

 

Right now a single person can feed an entire city

 

If you want to revive farming, you need to make it so that a single person cannot feed an entire city so that there is a need for more farmers and a higher demand for their produce.

 

Perhaps if you were to make it so that the crops of the last year cannot feed people for the next few years, maybe that would help out with reviving farming.

 

That's all I have to say. Think of it as you will.

 

EDIT: If the term "Make food gathering vanilla", is that referring to removing the use of hoes in farming or making the drop rates and crafting of food vanilla? If it's making the drop rates vanilla, I'm down for it;we need to reduce the amount of food in this game somehow.

Edited by NotEvilAtAll
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54 minutes ago, Sporadic said:

Tie expiration dates to the Seasons mechanic. Food expiration would be greatly increased to be less annoying, but still expire every IRL week so that every RP "year" farmest must harvest their crops to feed people during the winter.
Pros: Immersive. Ties in with seasons and winter which are popular mechanics. Cons: You will need to learn about the LotC calendar and timekeeping.

 

This. This seems like the way to do it. Learning the calendar isn't hard at all - a week is a year, a day is a month, seasons. Could even make a post about it and pin it in the guide section or something, so new players or people who need to refresh their memory like myself can easily go and see that all. This, coupled with the requirement for multiple farmers for a city(perhaps by limiting how much one player can harvest in a single day-night cycle, or an IRL day), would create an interesting and realistic, but not overly difficult farming situation. The real problem would be getting players to be willing to dedicate time to clicking wheat in a block game.

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1 minute ago, Star Platinum said:

The real problem would be getting players to be willing to dedicate time to clicking wheat in a block game.

This is a bit of a crazy idea... but what if clicking on a block of wheat also harvests the blocks around it? Would that fix this issue or am I on drugs?

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1 minute ago, NotEvilAtAll said:

This is a bit of a crazy idea... but what if clicking on a block of wheat also harvests the blocks around it? Would that fix this issue or am I on drugs?

 

That sounds like a benefit that could be given to higher level farmers. Maybe the extra wheat in a small radius wouldn't count towards the harvest limit? That way, more experienced farmers could gather more in a day, and faster, too. Not a bad idea tbh

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22 minutes ago, NotEvilAtAll said:

EDIT: If the term "Make food gathering vanilla", is that referring to removing the use of hoes in farming or making the drop rates and crafting of food vanilla? If it's making the drop rates vanilla, I'm down for it;we need to reduce the amount of food in this game somehow.

That is what it means. Vanilla drop rates are very high so it's likely this will lead to a large surplus of food everyone is able to get to. This isn't a bad thing, but not conducive to Farmer RP.

 

7 minutes ago, Star Platinum said:

 

This. This seems like the way to do it. Learning the calendar isn't hard at all - a week is a year, a day is a month, seasons. Could even make a post about it and pin it in the guide section or something, so new players or people who need to refresh their memory like myself can easily go and see that all. This, coupled with the requirement for multiple farmers for a city(perhaps by limiting how much one player can harvest in a single day-night cycle, or an IRL day), would create an interesting and realistic, but not overly difficult farming situation. The real problem would be getting players to be willing to dedicate time to clicking wheat in a block game.

 

 

This is something we're currently leaning towards, yes. It's one of the measures which has the least chance of failure due to poor balancing.

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Food should be a need on this server if farming is meant to have any value. 

 

Methods of hunger draining like effects of winter, racial weakness, etc, would make food an actual need. Sprint jumping is one of the most annoying things all players do, it's not immersive and reminds me of a playground, make it so sprint jumping drains hunger at a very high rate.

 

Food should have an expiration date, if not it would just pile up to amounts that would make it unnecessary to farm at all, and items like the thanic box would become redundant. Make it so that harvesting food like wheat is easy, but other harvests more risky with consequence.

 

Makes scythes and plows a necessity for farming. Plows could be just a player mounting a cow(called an ox) which follows a designated path, harvesting whatever is harvestable. Scythes should wear and need repair. 

 

Since were here talking about removing nexus, make it so that all gathering trades like farming don't have a lvl/exp system. What the heck is the difference between one mediocre farmer and a masterful one irl that would make their harvest significant? However I think it would be interesting to retain casket drops.

 

But the real question is, how do we make farming fun? I don't think anyone actually wants to play a serf on this server and plow a field all day, and just "give" their harvests to their skype friends after a few hollers about some "group donation chest" from which they receive a virtual "pat on the back."

 

I honestly don't think there is a way to make the gathering professions fun. But for the sole purpose of gathering food to meet a need and survive the above should be considered. 

 

Edited by Vamoose
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1 hour ago, NotEvilAtAll said:

This is a bit of a crazy idea... but what if clicking on a block of wheat also harvests the blocks around it? Would that fix this issue or am I on drugs?

1
 

Any thoughts on what I've said here? @Sporadic

 

((Sorry that I pinged you....))

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Just now, NotEvilAtAll said:

Any thoughts on what I've said here? @Sporadic

 

((Sorry that I pinged you....))

 

 

That in particular is a bit messy to code although it'd be really cool to have a scythe-like item to swiftly harvest crops. But maybe we can think of other ways to make farming fun for people.

 

I've always been a long-time fan of the head-block crops, as depicted for example here: https://static.planetminecraft.com/files/resource_media/screenshot/1527/2015-07-01_1414379095644.jpg

This would be a really amazing perk for farmers, especially if combined with custom chef recipes. Unfortunately there's a big risk of massive load put on the server if we put this in :\

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Does the Dev team still have a need for a beta testing team? I remember being on one long ago with warhead as the lead. 

 

You could consider one, might be worthwhile having some players test out plugins for quality.

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Just now, Vamoose said:

Does the Dev team still have a need for a beta testing team? I remember being on one long ago with warhead as the lead. 

 

You could consider one, might be worthwhile having some players test out plugins for quality.

 

 

some people on the team (@ShameJax) want this but I always felt that it costs me way more time setting it all up than it offers benefits. Perhaps if we were a 10x bigger server...

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Remember to nerf the food yeild from animals as well;If you reduce crop yeilds but keep the breeding food yeild intact everyone will just use their crops to breed animals because that would be the most effective way to make food. (Maybe revert it to vanilla drops? Currently killing animals gives you like 3x vanilla amounts of meat)

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1 hour ago, NotEvilAtAll said:

Remember to nerf the food yeild from animals as well;If you reduce crop yeilds but keep the breeding food yeild intact everyone will just use their crops to breed animals because that would be the most effective way to make food. (Maybe revert it to vanilla drops? Currently killing animals gives you like 3x vanilla amounts of meat)

0
 

Also make sure to have woodcutters not be able to feed themselves and others entirely on apples

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farming still isn't profitable even now and grinding in no way helps farmers RP. making food hard to get just makes it a pain in the ass for everyone, and most food transactions just involve people run around yelling "foooooood" like some zombie with 0 real RP.

 

just remove expirations and anyone who wants to rp a farmer can do it just as effectively as they do already.

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