A Point for Poison

[spiral aurora]

As it stands, there really is no point to the varieties of poisonous mushrooms in the game's current version.

Adding the ability to take these mushrooms, boil them down and synthesize poisons/medicines from them would validate their existence in game outside of only being used for composting and multiplayer jokes.

Poisons could be used to tip/coat weapons and arrows for an added punch and much needed flare to base-game combat.

Certain poisonous mushrooms could be used to make tea/medicines for powerful healing buffs.

[twin walrus]

ghost pipes are a good medicine irl they are used in tinctures for various uses

[soft siren]

alternatively, if nutrition was harder to come by to make it worthwhile, some poisonous/inedible mushrooms can be cooked in specific ways to make them edible
like parboiling fly amanita makes them edible, morels have to be cooked thoroughly etc

[keen frost]

I know a decently common thing with certain poisonous food items is to soak them in water to leech out the poison.

I'm not sure poison darts are the move. Poisons and venoms are fundamentally different in function, and many poisonous mushrooms just wouldnt be potent as a weapon enhancement, or even useful if they were potent.

Generally, the fantasy with poisonous forage is facing the challenge of correctly identifying them. You could meet that fantasy by hiding poison values until the player has eaten at least one. Then you have some trial and error, and light game mastery.

That would weaken mushrooms as a food source, so we could add other forage options without too much impact on balance (edible flowers, nuts, fiddleheads, etc), which then makes players less reliant on mushrooms. Turns it into a useful optional side quest or last ditch gamble, and we get more plant/food diversity.

As for synthesis for herbal remedies, I am all in favor of that. Just a matter of pinpointing appropriate examples.

[analog forum]

Would love to see this

[glass mountain]

once we get medicinal teas i'm sure some of this will become real hehe

[keen frost]

has that been announced?

[hasty tulip]

I made a similar suggestion some weeks ago, lemme copy-paste it in here

Make poisonous mushrooms useful (except trolling your friends) by using them to make poisons of different strengths and durations that can be used to tip arrows and spears in.
New furniture - alchemist table that requires glas, wood boards and sulfuric acid or other non-food liquids to build, uses those liquids as fuel to work. Needed to craft the poisons.
Stronger mushrooms like funeral bells and death caps would require additional ingredients like aqua vitae, chromite, rusty gears, rot, etc. to make the poison workable, to avoid using those mushrooms exclusively for OP arrows.
Maybe also introduce venomous enemies, sicknesses (from cold/heat/wolf + bear attacks) or tetanus from high lvl rust mobs, which can only be countered by remedies made of poisonous mushrooms, also on the alchemist table

[glass mountain]

it's been mentioned in an interview https://youtu.be/l_agbJN9Fro?si=6QZA_k5XbB6ZC9ob

[keen frost]

ah, didnt remember that part, cool

[wispy ibex]

I personally would just make mushrooms poison status listed as unknown in the handbook until you eat them

then they could include a handbook page on recognizing poisonous mushrooms

which would make them an environmental threat, which i think is good enough

[spiral aurora]

I would love to see this, you could have it as a setting and would be on by default when you select Survival mode

Another problem that arises once you start farming is that you really don't have a reason to ever touch mushrooms again. They take more time to collect, could be poison and are less nutritious than every other vegetable. This is unfortunate, and of course there are things in ever game you'll only use a few a few times like crude items, but i think it's unfortunate that Mushrooms also fall into this category with how much variety there is for them.

In the grand scheme of things, better mushrooms would be a great thing, but it's pretty far down on the list of things i'd be excited to see improved in Vintage (RIVERS AND IMPROVED TERRAIN GEN)

[kindred hornet]

yes, pointless content should be either cut or given a use

[gusty obsidian]

found this thread while thinking of ghost pipes, ghost pipe tincture would be really awesome as a rare healing item

[gusty obsidian]

seconding this as well, I REALLY want alchemy and medicine, it would be fun and rewarding to mix up potions and poison
I do think it would also be fun if we could make penicillin, but thats scope creep

[hasty tulip]

it also fits the world building quite well, there are literally alchemistic vials and other stuff in story locations and ruins, if we can copy their jonas tech we can copy their alchemy

[verbal sluice]

Sounds like someone has never baked a poison mushrooms pie and left it at their friends house XD

(tbf, idk if thats possible without mods, I always play with food mods)

But yea, thats a good thing with the alchemy mod, give you a use for poisonous mushrooms

[thick owl]

Tinctures of poison would be nice, and the sadist in me would kind of like to have a way of feeding mushrooms to animals to determine if they are poisonous or not. And if you could distil out the poison so you can add it to food without changing the tool tips...

That being said, mushrooms are really fast to grow in a modern setting, so also adding the ability to harvest mycelium to grow more of the same type of mushroom would make them way more useful. And if you want to add acclimation, microdose on the shrooms until the toxin stops affecting you!

[kindred hornet]

pigs are fine after eating some mushrooms that would kill humans

[thick owl]

Would any potential toxin bioaccumulate then? Or gathering the pig would flush them out? Just wondering if you could rear 'poison pigs' whose meat would hurt you because they were foraging on nearby mushrooms

[kindred hornet]

i think they shit them out

[wispy ibex]

i mean

we already have the handbook

it's just not used well so far with poison

jus make it so that the handbook has a mushroom identification page

which is kinda vague but still helpful in general

[sour robin]

Metallic poison does bioaccumulate, but seraphs seem to shrug off lead poisoning, so I wouldn't know if our playercharacters' would care

[thick owl]

It's not like we eat the lead yet, and lead would often take years to show up. Seraphs also don't get metal fume fever from overheating zinc though, and that's basically instantaneous incapacitation

Honestly, just removing the -hp tips from mushrooms and doubling their satiety would be my suggestion. Make them a GOOD food source that people want, that isn't farmable by normal means, and that run the risk of killing you if you pick wrong

As for the drug mushrooms, make it that you get a chance to make decorated pottery when you make pots while high

Use it to gain 'artistic flair' or something. Give extra decorations and such if you hit the dosage correctly

Amanita muscaria (fly agaric) – Contains the psychoactive muscimol and the neurotoxin ibotenic acid. Ibotenic acid decarboxylates into muscimol upon curing of the mushroom, rendering it relatively non-toxic, though death via respiratory depression is possible. Muscimol intoxication is often considered unpleasant and undesirable however, and as such has seen little recreational use compared to the unrelated psilocybin mushroom, though it has been used as an entheogen by the native people of Siberia.

^^ from Wikipedia. Could potentially use as a way of achieving 'deep sleep' by curing fly agaric. Would suggest as either a way of skipping days or sleeping through a temporal storm (though potentially with some health side effects for a bit after)

"Poisonous mushrooms taste bad." – People who have eaten the deadly Amanitas and survived have reported that the mushrooms tasted quite good.

^^ Mushroom Wikipedia with the banger quotes

[lusty heron]

I see u, west

[young flint]

Isolated and diluted poisons to act as medicines would tie in nicely with the status effect system expansion on the roadmap

[sour robin]

Very much so! Especially the planned teas!

You get maybe a debuff from eating bad food, drink a laxative poison in the correct dose to clear the debuff and some of your hunger bar

[kindred hornet]

ah yes, the shitting update

[rose brook]

More like an emetic to vomit… either that or ingesting clay or charcoal

[wispy ibex]

I don't think it fits the developers scope of the game to be adding small stuff like that

You could mod it in but lead poisoning isn't a thing for the same reason wolves don't give your seraphs infections when you get bit - it's a tad too much

[sour robin]

Understandable, but poison is really cool

[kindred hornet]

Tyron did promise uncompromising wilderness survival

[keen frost]

*glances at 120 species of butterfly that already exist <.<

[clear rose]

maybe i havent been paying attention enough but i dont think ive ever even seen a butterfly in the game, even tho they apparently exist

[keen frost]

They're pretty small, but I've seen dozens. Theres also single pixel grasshoppers n stuff.

[thick owl]

Actually, an environmental impact could be spawn blocking with treated blocks. Soak blocks in concentrated poison to prevent things from spawning on them

Or laced bait - a method of incapacitating wild animals by adding some mushroom toxin to the food before setting it. Animals that ate it would either die 1-2 days later, or you could make it render them unconscious to make it easier to trap bears / wolves

Baiting the area around your base to cull the local wolf population would be worthwhile to farm mushrooms, it’s a temporary solution (hence the need for more of it) and is pretty in-universe too. “If I eat the mushroom and it kills me, what if the wolf or the bear eats the mushroom”?

[rose brook]

Fish poison

Throw certain poisons into water and it will cause fish to move slowly enough to be speared.

[wispy ibex]

yeah and thats a super niche feature that could probably be easily removed because of how few people interact with it

[thick owl]

Also, wilderness survival. If poison is in the world, SOMEONE is going to use it

Hell, even just make it a trader selling item for shadier merchant types

[kindred hornet]

what for