Food and sleep, instead of using sunlight to restore sanity

[unreal vortex]

In the game, your sanity increases rapidly as long as you stay near the surface.

I understand that optimism is important in life, but a guy who can simply stand in the sunlight and start giggling happily doesn't really fit the style of a Lovecraftian game, right?

Moreover, if this change is not made, then in practice players only need a large enough supply of berry juice or some other simple food that can be produced in bulk. Alcohol also fails to serve its intended purpose. People brew alcohol to drink it, after all. Having players distill liquor mainly for making alcohol bandages is a rather strange design choice.

[sudden vector]

Temporal Stability.
Not sanity.

Alcohol wouldn't have any effect.

[unreal vortex]

Well, to me, they're almost the same.

At the very least, if I go through the effort of making high-quality pies, alcoholic drinks, and jams, only for them to be barely different from eating raw carrots, I don't think that would be good game design.

[lone kraken]

its not just about the satiety restoration

[sudden vector]

mechanically, it's Stability - I'm not sure where Sanity came from but it's fundamentally incorrect :V
especially with chapter 2 for huge spoiler reasons

the benefit of pies is better preservation/meal alternative, jam could definitely do with a buff (like Scoop of Jam)
alcohol will more than likely get a lookover once we get the status update in full; currently, I made a bandaid mod where you can trade booze for gears

[wanton hull]

Sanity is a comparison that's easy to make given the other major gritty hardcore survival games with eldritch-y theming that are out there, but temporal stability isn't the same. That said, having more ways of restoring stability or making temporally stable areas with advanced tech would be desirable and has been brought up many times.

[sudden vector]

like making rift wards actually viable instead of literally-lanterns-but-worse, yeah

[wanton hull]

One of many such proposals to make rift wards better, haha.

That was honestly what I had in mind...

I do think it'd be useful if sleep helped restore temporal stability faster if you're already in a temporally stable area, in the same way that you regenerate health faster (only because you're speeding up time as you sleep) when you rest. If I recall correctly, sleeping doesn't affect your natural temporal stability gain or loss, which seems like an oversight.

Correct me if I'm wrong, though.

[unreal vortex]

OK, that's incorrect then.

But better food choices ultimately only get converted into hunger reduction, and generally speaking, after one or two in-game years, players already have an overflowing food supply. For players, this makes the choice between different foods largely irrelevant, while the complicated preparation processes of advanced foods make it not so worthy.

This is another reason why I think an additional numerical dimension should be added to represent food quality.

[wanton hull]

Not disagreeing with that! Having some kind of reason to farm more exotic foods or make more complex dishes (outside of pies) seems reasonable, and there are already mods that address it, so I'd imagine the Vanilla late-game food experience would be improved at some point.

As of now, surplus food is mostly used to turn into compost so that you can turn that compost into terra preta so you can farm more gooder

[sudden vector]

I agree - it's just that there's no real rhyme or reason to be tying that into a mechanic like Temporal Stability
it'd be better fit for considerations re: the status update, like if nutrition gets overhauled

[wanton hull]

...I will refrain from talking about improving the composting system, or else we'll be here all day.

[unreal vortex]

Additionally, temporal stability is not really a scarce resource in the current game. It can be restored very casually and easily. If you have been mining for too long, you just go stand in the sunlight. That does not really qualify as a strategy.

This is also why I initially tried to combine the two systems, even though that approach was rejected from a narrative perspective.

[sudden vector]

Assuming we get systems adjacent to alchemy/potioncrafting, I'd sooner see alternatives to temporal gear 'refills' like Jonas device expansions or crafting tiers/resource trees out of the gears themselves

Food- could? play a factor in that, maybe, it depends on how weird the team wants to get with Seraph biology, or if they want to leave that alone to avoid unnecessary complexity

-# just wait, in 5-7 years we'll have nuka cola temporal gear brandy-potions

[wanton hull]

This is a bit of an odd quirk of the current system, yeah. The only way of restoring temporal stability while caving is by fighting strong monsters (which restores a little bit, more for stronger monsters) or by literally stuffing a temporal gear into yourself. Expanding on how you could restore temporal stability would be good, but I'd echo shazza in that it probably wouldn't be done via food, unless you were putting temporal gear crumbs into your bread, I guess.

All to say: it's reasonable to suggest better uses for food surplus in the late game, and better uses for alcohol, but temporal stability restoration probably wouldn't make a lot of sense for food.

[lone kraken]

putting chunks of metal in my bread sounds inedible, but seraphs are unusual!

[unreal vortex]

This seems to create some confusion.

If I were designing the game system, based on the premise that backpack space is limited, I would try to make combat carry a penalty rather than a reward. For example, taking damage could reduce temporal stability, and even if killing enemies restored a small amount of temporal stability, it should not be a meaningful source of recovery.

This would encourage players to carefully manage the tools they bring before leaving home. If they are going mining, they should avoid combat; if they are going into battle, they should not expect to gather resources at the same time.

[sudden vector]

re: alcohol I can absolutely see it becoming the core for potion bases

[unreal vortex]

And mushrooms?

[lone kraken]

mushrooms for sure, especially the poison ones

[wanton hull]

I think the game's design already does this. Wearing armor meant for combat will slow you down and make you much hungrier, and holding that armor in your inventory takes up space you could use to carry ores or other tools. Killing monsters restoring temporal stability, from what I can tell, is added so that you can extend your mining trips a little when you're very very low down in the earth (where a million things spawn and temporal stability drain is highest) or when you're at very low stability and monsters automatically spawn around you (so that you have a chance to restore enough stability so that you can get back to the surface).

Only the strongest enemies restore a reasonable amount of temporal stability in my experience.

I would probably not penalize combat any more given how...basic and punishing it can already be.

But we are getting a combat update soon...we'll see what they add there.

[unreal vortex]

This situation would almost never happen when mining, but rather when diving into natural caves hunting treasures. If you are mining directly through a vertical shaft, low stability would be much less likely to occur.

[wanton hull]

I don't think I follow! I've gotten into problems with low stability all of the time while digging vertical shafts when trying to prospect, and it can happen if you get stuck into a winding cave network, too. Temporal stability more or less acts like a timer on your caving expeditions unless you're willing to power through by expending temporal gears, which also hurts you. The only difference is that with vertical shafts, you can probably leave easily with the ladders you used to make the shaft.

I'm not disagreeing that we should have more ways of increasing temporal stability, I just don't think it should be done via food.

[sudden vector]

at the moment, it's a glorified oxygen meter with "hidden" bodies of "water", and a mostly self-solving counter on trying to overextend by having temporal gears cost HP to refill
to which- similar to vanilla fruit trees, rift wards, and crude bows, I literally just don't see people interacting with tempgears that way because it's too expensive for such little payout

but it's a conversation for a stability thread, food isn't really involved

[unreal vortex]

Yes, that is exactly what I mean. You dig a vertical shaft, mine deep underground until your temporal stability gets low, and then within ten seconds your character can return to the surface, stand in the sunlight for two minutes, and go back underground to continue mining.

This does not create a meaningful challenge. It is just an inconvenience for the player.

[sudden vector]

even in the hypothetical of damage=stability damage, it still doesn't justify it - people are going to take the easiest option, so it then stands to create frustration by arbitrarily punishing combat even more

[wanton hull]

I mean, on that we're in agreement.

I think it's just the methods of fixing it that we disagree on.

[unreal vortex]

Alright, let me try a different approach. Add some consumable items crafted from rusty gears, one or two Jonas parts, and similar materials, which can restore temporal stability. At the same time, greatly reduce the rate of temporal stability recovery on the surface, or even remove surface-based recovery entirely.

[sudden vector]

100% don't remove surface recovery if you keep unstable surfaces - if surface instability is removed, 100% you need a very earlygame compromise on items

[wanton hull]

I'd probably not do away with removing surface stability regain, yeah, at least not without a pretty big mechanical rework of stability.

[unreal vortex]

I mean just another type of food lol

[wanton hull]

But having a jonas device to restore stability that isn't literally "I put the glowy thing in my body"? Yeah, totally, could be neat.

Unfortunately, the lore as it currently is doesn't really support temporal stability going up by eating things. It's weird time bullcrap, basically.

[unreal vortex]

It would only prevent players from venturing deep underground during the early game. That is not necessarily a bad thing.

[sudden vector]

you're already disincentivized by both the inability to break rocks without metal tools and by combat
it truthfully doesn't need to be more punishing, not in the way of hard locking you out due to stability imbalances

[unreal vortex]

Copper and tin both have shallow deposits, so the real difficulty threshold would come at the iron age.

[sudden vector]

surface tin is extraordinarily rare and is most commonly found halfway to the mantle or lower, along with the other bronze alloys
that'd mean the wall's hit as you're struggling pre-armour