dense stream
I intended to drop this in the survey and went to bed and didn't want to forget again. Yapper extraordinare, sorry.
On Food
I enjoy the extra challenge that food spoilage provides! However, all raw food seems to spoil at the same rate. (I can't keep cooked food around long enough for it to spoil, so I don't know how long it takes.)
While it's probably a pain to code, it would be more realistic and interesting if everything had a different spoilage point. For instance, I've never had fresh meat IRL that lasted as long as a fresh veggie. Conversely, I can guarantee spoiled food fast by making veggie soup.
Whether such a change is made or not, it would also be very helpful to have a visual indicator on the food to indicate how long it has left before it goes bad.
This could be simply a color coded dot in the upper left hand corner, similar to how the survivor UI lets you identify morale, etc, at a glance — green for fresh, yellow for going stale, and red for "spoils next phase".
I understand and appreciate the intent behind making all non-preserved food in the city spoil after a certain date. However, it's demoralizing to see multiple bars of "food" on a new location's blurb and know very little of it will actually be edible.
My first suggestion regarding that is to shift it so that there's only an 80% chance of food spoiling after the aforementioned time has passed, and there's a 20% chance that the food will be edible. This would also make the map feel more alive — like there's still other humans out there, that a tragedy occurred in this specific spot recently. Extra human NPCs or uninfected corpses could be sprinkled around to reinforce this
If that isn't feasible, my other suggestion is to make it so that once the food spoils, it contributes to the "base resource" category instead of the "food" category. That way, nobody goes into Vivaldi's expecting a full belly and comes out with a bucket of manure and two bags of potato chips.
**On Skills/Progression **
I love the setup of the new skill system!
That being said, if the current gain of experience points for "normal" is intended to be the rate that goes live, I do think it would benefit from changes to the experience gained from a scavenging run. Right now, you can go to the police station and clear it and come home to the same amount of experience you got from 38 Irving Drive. That feels really weird.
My suggestion is that each zombie killed gives anywhere from .25 to .5 points experience, by default, on top of the experience already awarded for a run.
If it's possible for the game to tell whether a zombie was taken down through an ambush or downed in a brawl, perhaps make it so that brawling zombies rewards marginally more experience (think something like .35 exp instead of .25) since brawling comes with the risk of deep wounds. If deep wound infections are turned off, it could still be slightly more but not as much, since it still carries risk.
I love that you took characters that were extremely meta and nerfed them, along with making formerly "useless" characters much more usable. It would be amazing to see y'all double down on this by spreading some of the "meta' positive traits out among survivors even more to see if it outweighs their negatives. (I love gritting my teeth over this.)
I think a neat stretch goal — again, this might be hard to code — for future patches would be to make it so that when a character is at a workbench related to something they specifically in, they earn marginally more experience. For instance, Christine gets 1.1x the experience when she's planting in the garden, or Barb gains 1.1x at the weapons/workbench. (It would also be very funny if doing things opposed to a character's traits made them earn more slowly, so I can sentence Hudson to cooking forevermore, but I'm quite sure that's not feasible.)
astral laurel