Rotten Food and Drinks

[Kylie]

I’ve mentioned this before and I’ve seen it in the trello. But I would like to elaborate about how it’s gonna function and you guys comment your thoughts.

Let’s take the example of… bread. Simple and common. It’s at 100% quality.
As long as the bread is in your inventory, the bread will start losing it’s quality bit by bit.
Nothing too crazy, it can be -1% every 30 minutes or it can be every 10 minutes… your choice.
When you right click on the bread in your inventory or hover your mouse over it, you’ll see “Time to rot - 1:39” for example. So it’s gonna take an hour and 39 minutes till it reaches 50%. And then it’ll say “Time to decay - ******”
Same with drinks. But it all depends on the type of drink/food.
Milk will rot significantly quicker than other drinks.
Canned soda rots much slower
And water doesn’t rot… cuz it’s water

Same with food. Canned foods last 5x as long as regular dry food.
Fresh meat lasts much less. However, having it cooked can help lengthen the time.

The only way to stop this rottening from happening is by making a fridge/cooler. Because these storages have no good use other than decoration. So why not give them an important use by letting the food/drinks last 10x longer, if not ever rot. Again, you choose if the fridge stops rotting for good or just slows it down.

So, having in the inventory…
Bread: -1% every 10 minutes (same for other vegetables)
Fresh meat: -1% every 1 minute
Cooked meat: -1% every 5 minutes (fish are included in this)
Milk: -1% every 2 minutes
Canned food/drinks: -1% every 50 minutes
Juice boxes: -1% every 20 minutes (or 15)
MRE: -1% every 1 hour
Crafted foods(e.g: Pizza, Cakes, Doughnuts, etc): -1% every 20 minutes

Putting any of these in the fridge/cooler will make them last 10x longer or stop the rotting effect

I haven’t decided if logging out while having food in your inventory stops the rotting since your hunger stops as well. I’ll leave that for you guys to decide.

Side note: I think campfires should only let the player cook raw meat only. Crafting a smelter will be used for metal scrap and such materials. And the oven is used for other, more advanced, foods.

[hootcracks]

I’d like to see this in the game. Maybe the food in you inventory could change appearance depending on their quality.

[Kylie]

Change sprites?

[hootcracks]

By that I meant their appearence. If a food item has under 50% quality, it will change appearence to look more rotten, dirty etc.
Example: Milk - Looks like a normal box of milk when quality is above 50%. When it reaches below 50% quality the box would appear soggy, green and dirty.

[Oyamat]

Add rotten bananas/apples.

[Pineapple]

The amount of time in-game for food to rot seems pretty solid imo, but that might change when 4.0 goes into a testable phase.

Making refrigerators functional sounds like a great idea. I think it would be cool if there were tiers of fridges that give more slots to hold items, such as a cooler (portable, meant to hold a few canned goods and some drinks) or an industrial fridge that requires more power to use but has 1.5 more slots compared to the standard fridge. We could then have a freezer that preserves certain foods for a longer time but have significantly less slots and some of fridges could have a second compartment that acts as a freezer like in real life.

Logging out with food in your inventory should stop the decay. It would be really annoying to log off with some higher tiered foods and then logging back after a day to find it around 50% quality.

A type of oven for advanced recipes would be pretty cool. I do think the non food items should have some kind of separate contraption for smelting since they are two completely different types of things.

Overall I like the direction the food system is going for 4.0

[daslito]

yeah its a good idea i’d like to see this in game too