Lo-Fi Games

I think that some more tweaks are needed to the food system.
characters now need 3x the food to stay satisfied. And it takes 10x as much ingredients to make the food. 10 wheatstraw to make 1 strawflour, 2+ strawflour sacks to make 1 Loaf of bread, 2 loaves of bread to make one meatwrap that is less then 1/2 of the nutrition that it was.

I currently have 10 wheat farms producing 60%. that means I only get 6 strawflour per harvest. That means only about 3 loaves of bread.

I'm back to spending all my time trying to make sure my people are feed and can't do much else. Having to manually feed all the ones that are passing out because they can't get to the food before other eat it all.

I think 3 or 4 wheat bales per strawflour is fair, but one strawflour should be able to make 2 or 3 loaves of bread. and 1 loaf of bread should make 3 or 4 meat wraps.

Something must've changed since your post, because my people are using 1 flour sack to make 1 loaf of bread, and a bit over 1 loaf to make a foodcube.

Still, this is fucked up, here's why:

1 foodcube weights a kilo. It's made of greenfruit and bread, that weights half a kilo each. It uses 1 bread, which is fine, and 8 fruits, which is wha?!

1 loaf of bread is roughly 50% water and 50% flour, so about 250 grams of each, maybe less water. Sack of flour that it's made of weights 4 kilos. Still it is consumed wholy.

See where i'm going there? I'm sure rest of the food is just as messed.

What if wheatgrass simply took longer to grow? Right now all crops seem to grow very quickly (a matter of weeks at most?). Even on an alien world, that seems too fast.

So, instead of reducing immersion via contrived food-crafting requirements, increase immersion by making crop growth more realistic.

I'll add that when I first played as the settlers, I was very worried when I planted my first crops, because I thought I would run out of food before they grew, simply based on how realistic the rest of the world felt. I was relieved from a gameplay perspective when I discovered how relatively quickly one could get in a crop, though it felt like an overall let-down to the world itself.

Could be both: slower growth, lesser cost.

I agree that some balance was\is needed, since i've been overstocking myself with raw food for a while now, and had less then no problem with feeding 20+ chars, but the numbers just doesn't add up in this upd

Okay something changed since I posted that but I'm not sure what. I have meatwraps in inventory with NU Ranges from 15 to 2574. Most are 50 or 125. I'm saving those 2574's for a party since I think they must be 10 foot subs.

But it's late night and I have time to write so I shall express my thoughts.

I'm thinking along the lines that a person should have to eat 100nus a day. I'm thinking 100 = 100% of doctor daily recommended diet. That seems to work with the current food nu levels.
i.e. 2 meatwraps
or 5 dried meats
or 1 gohan + 2 loaves of bread
or 50 greenfruit.

Seems about right.

The issue is with balancing growing and production.
I can see it taking several days for the crops to grow. but we cant go full RL times, that would take months for crops to mature. Not making the game more fun to sit and watch the grass grow. But 4 to 7 days seems about right in VR. That means you need to plant them in cycles so that you have a steady supply of resources. I find that an interesting additional challenge to setting up a base.

Where I lose it is the ratio of ingredients.
I can get 60 - 80 wheat straw from a good harvest in a moderately good location. currently that translates to 6 or 8 strawflour sacks per harvest. That is a pretty tough ratio drop but not undoable except for it takes 1 full sack of flour to make just one loaf of bread. (that did change since my previous post)
That means in 7 days of growing I get about 1 loaf of bread a day.
And with that loaf I can make 1 meatwrap or foodcube.

A full sack of flour to make one loaf of bread and one full loaf of bread to make one sandwich? No wonder they have 2574 nu's.

I think it would all balance out if we could make 3 or 4 loaves of bread from a sack of flour, and 3 or 4 sandwiches from a loaf. at best that would be 12 meat wraps per sack of flour. enough to feed 6 people for 1 day. so a week of growing would provide a week of food for 6 people.

That is just an example with Wheat in a 60% green area. It would become even more interesting with other crops and other fertility percentages. In a 100% green area you would be able to feed a squad of 10. In a 30% area you would have to take extra steps to feed a squad of 4.

And that doesn't count all the other things you need to grow, greenfruit, cotton, hemp, ect...

Honestly I like way that we have to grow and harvest then process things to make food in Kenshi. It's a different way to work on the base building aspect that is fun and interesting. I'm just feeling like the new tweaks are a little off, and need to be tweaked just a little more.

Ahhh yes brain has been relieved of Kenshi calculations. I can rest now. g'night all.

Sol Lignum wrote:Could be both: slower growth, lesser cost.

I agree that some balance was\is needed, since i've been overstocking myself with raw food for a while now, and had less then no problem with feeding 20+ chars, but the numbers just doesn't add up in this upd

The entire experimental build is currently pretty broken with the update. They didn't do a tweak, they swerved harder than wasted drunk on the highway at 2 am.

They tried to bring to focus back to farming and base tending, but they appear to have adjusted things hamfistedly without thinking or testing the effects it had on the rest of the production line or other variables in the engine. That happens when there are massive corrections.

Yeah I'm not waiting around for food to cook anymore, but it still takes time for crops to grow and base refinery options for both the trade goods and food stock are not only not making mathematical sense they aren't following the ratio formulas listed out in the construction kit for production.

Example is try running a grain silo, or even a bread oven. You're not getting a 1 to 1 as listed in the construction kit on all ingredients. Something is skewing the outputs and causing certain ingredients to consume at a much faster rate than they should. This is especially true for the new trade goods changes. I may be going through two cactus for a bottle of rum unit but I'm going through over 20-30 water. Meanwhile the bread oven many be giving me a 1 for 1 on flour to bread but water is actually being consumed at a much lower rate, even though it is also supposed to be at a 1:1. And the wheat-straw to flour should be a 1:1 and instead is a 10:1.

But the worst part of it is I go into the construction kit and I try to say fix wheat-straw by adjusting the grain silo functionality and make it a 1 wheat-straw to 10 flour which should correct this situation. No change to production consumption rates, zero. That's not how it's supposed to work regardless of the ratios. They introduced a bug somewhere and who the heck knows where it is.

cniht wrote: (...) And the wheat-straw to flour should be a 1:1 and instead is a 10:1.

But the worst part of it is I go into the construction kit and I try to say fix wheat-straw by adjusting the grain silo functionality (...)

1:1 would work in a single character survival game, where you have handfull of ingredients. We're speaking of stacks, barrels and sacks here. Realistically speaking, wheatstraw is roughly half straw (trash) half grains (edible stuff), so even assuming that whole stack is used, it should go 4 straws to 1 flour, since sack weights 4 kilos and that would require 4 stacks. If we assume that half is actually thrown away, then our current 10-1 ratio is about right. Main issue lay further, with flour+water to bread, and bread+ingredients to meal ratios. I mean, one, 4 kilo sack of flour + some water should either give huge ~5 kilo loaf, or up to 10 current loafs, considering weights. Furthermore, 8 fruits + 1 bread, 0.5 kilo each into one foodcube, 1 kilo, doesn't sounds right either.

As for FCS: i've send you a PM

As for bugs somewhere - don't think so, things seems consistent to what changenotes states. (production rate is x3, ingredients cost is x8). 10-1 straw-flour, 8-1 fruit-cube.

Sol Lignum wrote:

cniht wrote: (...) And the wheat-straw to flour should be a 1:1 and instead is a 10:1.

But the worst part of it is I go into the construction kit and I try to say fix wheat-straw by adjusting the grain silo functionality (...)

1:1 would work in a single character survival game, where you have handfull of ingredients. We're speaking of stacks, barrels and sacks here. Realistically speaking, wheatstraw is roughly half straw (trash) half grains (edible stuff), so even assuming that whole stack is used, it should go 4 straws to 1 flour, since sack weights 4 kilos and that would require 4 stacks. If we assume that half is actually thrown away, then our current 10-1 ratio is about right. Main issue lay further, with flour+water to bread, and bread+ingredients to meal ratios. I mean, one, 4 kilo sack of flour + some water should either give huge ~5 kilo loaf, or up to 10 current loafs, considering weights. Furthermore, 8 fruits + 1 bread, 0.5 kilo each into one foodcube, 1 kilo, doesn't sounds right either.

As for FCS: i've send you a PM

As for bugs somewhere - don't think so, things seems consistent to what changenotes states. (production rate is x3, ingredients cost is x8). 10-1 straw-flour, 8-1 fruit-cube.

Problem with the wheatstraw ratio is two fold. 1) Natural barrels don't have the capacity to hold anything near the volume you need to even feed a small group of people. So that means you have to mod them. That's not really the place you want to be starting from. 2) Farms and other devices (wells, meat drops) don't produce the needed crops in sufficent quantities to handle these jacked up ingredient costs. And trust me a full farm field or 3 should be producing a lot more flour than is currently letting on.

They should have been stretching farm production over a longer period of time but producing more. Keep cooking and intermediate ingredient prep short and then let your characters go do things in the interim a day or four each week or two weeks. And there is no way that it's even feasible let alone realistic that 40 water per rum container when your water tank holds 100 and your well holds 10. If they are going to use that as the primary trade good making a jar of hooch cannot take more water than the food fields need for two weeks.

Where i'm getting the 40, was the 20x ingredient cost for water then the x 2 production cost on the machine. While the machine wouldn't undercut the ingredient cost it had no problem blowing it up.

cniht wrote: (...)

It all depends on how you approach the problem. If you're OK with ratios of flour\water for bread and further, with bread\ingredients for meals, then farms are insufficient. But If you're NOT ok with them, and intend to or have already tweaked them, then farms are fine and good.

Also farms that grow longer and give more, are essentially the same as farm that grow quicker and give less

While we're waiting for the decision from devs on the issue, for personal use, i've just tweaked everything weightwise, or close to, so 8 straws (assuming half is thrown away) for 1 flour, 1 flour for 5 breads, 1:1 bread:veggies for foodcube, etcetera, plus i made farms grow longer, so it's around 3 ingame days from sow to harvest. Thank to devs, game is that easily moddable