(http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1371050-wip-last-seed-primary-needs-and-primitive-cooking/page__fromsearch__1)

As they say, "fail to plan, plan to fail." This is the planning thread for one of two mods I'm working the details out on, currently called Last Seed. Last Seed will be a hunger / thirst / sleep mod that has a strong emphasis on simplicity while still retaining immersion and increasing the importance of food and water. Expanding the existing cooking mechanics is also a desired focus.

Last Seed will be designed to be stand-alone, or as a part of a survival and immersion "trilogy" along side http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=11163 and Hearthfire (a camping / wilderness survival mod also in the planning stages). It will also be compatible with other Hypothermia mods, like Nitor's Hypothermia, and other camping mods, such as Camping Kit of the Northern Ranger, Camping Lite, and LtMattMoo's Camping.

This thread may not get a whole lot of activity since Frostfall is still in very active development, but I can now see the end of its development lifecycle from here and would like to start the dialogue early for my next project. That way I'll already have everyone's feedback and ideas on paper when I'm ready to implement.

So, here's what I've got rolling around in my head:

• Hunger, Thirst, and Sleep: I think I'll use the same scale as I did in Frostfall: 120 to 0, with 120-101 being the "bonus" range (well fed, well hydrated, well rested). Eating, drinking, and sleeping makes your status go up; failing to do so makes them go down. Every 20 points marks a "threshhold" where good or bad things happen.
  
• Tie the timing of the mod to game timescale. Provide adjustable hunger, thirst, and fatigue rates.
  
• Automatic eating option. This is inspired by Necessities of Morrowind, one of my favorite mods in this category. Allow the player to select a diet type; carnivore, omnivore, and herbavore. Use this setting to determine what the player should automatically eat at appropriate times from their inventory. Allow for selecting drink preference / precedence. Also allow the player to eat and drink manually.
  
• Automatic status messages. Keep in touch with the player when their condition changes.
  
• On-demand status checking, either via a power or some other means. Include active effects that show the player's status and the effects of that status.
  
• Hunger, thirst, and sleep should all have unique, interesting effects, and balanced against other mods (including Frostfall) that may also affect your performance.
  
• Show, don't tell. Togglable imagespace effects, animations, and other visual feedback are important in getting the player's attention, without getting in their way.
  
• Use existing assets. There's already tons of food diversity in Skyrim; I just want to give it a purpose.
  
• Cooking enhancements, with a focus on primitive cooking over a campfire or similar. I don't want this to turn into Iron Chef: Skyrim. Move the recipe for grilled chicken, grilled leeks, grilled venison, grilled anything, to an actual grill you can drop food onto and watch it cook.
  
• Allow player to place and use a full suite of camping equipment (shared code between Frostfall and Hearthfire), to facilitate cooking over a fire, and restoring Fatigue through sleeping.
  
• Refillable bottles and waterskins. Disallow sea-water (northern coast). The rest of Skyrim is verdant with pristine lakes and streams, that the player should be able to gather water from.

I'm on the fence about two particular features; fishing and trapping. Both of these features were planned in my head as being part of Hearthfire, since they are closer to wilderness survival activities. However, fishing is really just a food procurement method. Trapping will have other purposes than food (securing the campsite against random encounters, acquiring pelts), but it's still a primary method of catching food. Would it make more sense to put these in Last Seed instead? Or put them in both, and just make them compatible?

So, that's what's on my mind. The question is, what would you like to see? What do you feel is currently lacking in existing H/T/S mods? Thanks for your input.

Started a new thread, the old thread had over 200 posts and we were getting close to the limit.

Started thinking a lot about all of the talk over spoilage mechanics. Here's a few things that have come up in my mind. Warning: I am probably going to ramble on a lot.

As I've stated before, I have no desire to keep track of the entire world's food supply at once and to do so would be both technically unfeasible and would be highly prone to errors. So, the focus needs to be on where the player is, and what the player experiences.

So, say the player enters a house in Rorikstead and sees 5 cabbages on a table. Should I, as a player, expect those cabbages to be rotted by the time the player comes back in a month? Why? I would think that whoever is living there is going to throw away bad food, and replace it with good food. Unless they're poverty-stricken, I don't see why they wouldn't have fresh food most / all of the time, especially with farms in such close proximity. So, if it's feasible that this would happen, why should I simulate it? It can just be understood that people aren't going to have rotten food in their houses, and I don't need to build an ecosystem around that.

Also note that the vast majority of food found in homes across Skyrim is owned. If you're going to be a thief, I don't think you should be going hungry in the first place. Steal and eat up; the Light Side road is usually harder anyway.

So that brings me to places besides homes; perhaps forts, civil war outposts, things like that. This is food that is probably farther removed from the source, it had to be shipped. I would think you could reasonably expect to find "stage 2" food here; stale bread, ripe fruits (more on that in a minute), so on. Meats would probably be cooked or otherwise preserved.

Then you have caves, crypts, bandit hideouts, so on. Anything in an unoccupied cave or an ancient draugr crypt will most definitely be rotten if it makes sense. Bandits will probably have a hit-and-miss assortment of freshness, these are folks that are used to making do on whatever they can find. In Last Seed, rotten food is essentially worse than no food at all; you'll probably end up losing more hunger and thirst via puking than you will gain from eating it.

All this to say, I think that instead of building this gigantic, lumbering spoilage framework for the entire world, I think it's more important that the food fit in with where it is. This means that:

• The freshest food (from homes and cities) is owned, unless you buy it or grow it or catch it yourself
  
• So-so food is available for free but it's not ideal
  
• There is no usable food in the places you'd normally spelunk, unless you make a habit of tearing up civilized areas.

Here is a review of the stages in case you missed it in the other thread:


Naming: I have decided to keep "ripe" as the name for the 2nd stage of fruits and vegetables. Ripening is part of the decay process as things get broken down into sugars. Ripe foods do taste better, but I'm not modeling taste, and stage 2 food will keep you just as well off as Stage 1 food anyway, so I don't see a problem there.

I would like to model spoilage within the player's inventory, as this is a lot more doable and plausible and will incentivize recycling your food supply periodically. I will come up with a mechanism to dispose of bad food cleanly from the world so that you don't end up with piles of rotten food somewhere that won't go away.

All of this however does not solve what I've started referring to, internally to myself, as "The Tomato Problem". That problem being, if I take a tomato out of my inventory and place it on a table in a house that I own, and come back in a month, do I have a rotten tomato on my table? Is the food persistent? Is that level of persistence even necessary? How immersion breaking is it that the outside air is the ultimate preservative? I don't have a good answer to The Tomato Problem yet, and I'm starting to wonder if there even needs to be a solution to it. Here's the most important question to answer, and the answer to it will drive whether or not this is a problem that needs to be solved: Does the Tomato Problem promote unimmersive behavior?

For my sake, I'd rather that the food quality just match the environs in such a way that it complements gameplay. Having the entire food supply of Skyrim start rotting from the core, with no AI routines in place to replace all of it or harvest fresh food, sounds like a bad idea.

I think that spoiling food in the player's inventory, restricting the access to fresh food by replacing food found far removed from its source with a decayed variant, and substantially increasing the weight of all foods will go a long way towards the desired outcome.

Skyrim is just a game. If you are going to implement spoilage, it simply doesn't make sense for the entire world to be affected.

Keep this in mind: most of Skyrim's cells reset after a set period of time. That alone invalidates the need to have food spoil in them, because it will all get replaced when the cell resets. The only cells that would need to be considered are the player home cells, which do not reset.

And personally, I'm really not going to care about that tomato someone left on a table if I don't intend to pick it up. It's just a tomato.

Good point about cell reset. I can still implement an "active spoiling" method by finding and replacing food found in certain locations, either at runtime or cell modifications. Probably runtime, when you load the cell; I'll have to see how fast this can be and what the cost is to the scripting system. This would be used to just check the Location keywords of the area you're in, and then set the quality of the surrounding food accordingly. Food found in barrels and other containers are simple to fix as those are just leveled list modifications. I, personally, find it immersion breaking to find fresh food in a long-abandoned cave somewhere.

Or, I could check the food as it comes into your inventory and decay it as necessary immediately to the expected level, instead of affecting it in the worldspace. That would be (far) simpler on my end, but it wouldn't let you see moldy or decayed food around you. Some significant texture work will probably go into new food models, so I'd like to preserve that if possible.

Accidentally posted this in the old thread so ignore it in that one.

I have been doing some research on preservation of meats ( I think that meat would be the best candidate for preservation since most other things would last about a week and as you pointed out canning isnt exactly supported by lore ) I think the 2 best ways of doing this in game would be through salting/smoking. Both processes take a considerate amount of time in real life and I dont think many players would be willing to check up on meat that needs to be salted for a few days to insure preservation.

I have thought of more game friendly alternatives to this. Salting would probably require you pick a salting option of a meat. For example you would scroll down the cooking menu select venison - salted and it would require X amount of salt piles. After completing this you would gain a Venison - Salted that would (i think at least for maintaining gameplay) last a week, maybe 2 weeks.

Smoking would be the same process but would require fire wood and it would be labeled Venison - Smoked and should probably last about 3-4 days.

All salted/smoked variants of meats should be an optional ingredient of recipes. Like a stew could use venison or venison - salted. They would be interchangeable.

The only thing on meat preservation is I could not find anything on poultry. So I assume that it cant be done with them. But animals like deer, elk, horse, cow, maybe rabbit should be fine to preserve. Fish can be salted as well. One thing I would like to see in preservation is that in real life there is a chance that the meat will fail the process and begin to rot. Perhaps have a chance for that to happen as well.

Also I was wondering what you thought about adding in frozen animals? Like you wondering through the frozen tundra of Skyrim when you happen across a elk that is long dead and is practically frozen. You could technically build a fire near it and thaw it and then harvest it. Something I would like to see from this is maybe have it described as frozen carcass (carcass would indicate that it was fed upon) and what you harvest from it may contain diseases from predators. This can actually happen in real life and is one of the dangers in survival in frozen areas. Eating from a frozen carcass can potentially give you a disease such a rabies.

I really like that approach to salting. If I do anything like that, it will be simple. Salting takes a long time, but then again so does tanning a hide; I might abstract that part away and just say "You salt the meat, here's your meat" and consume the salt. I don't think I'd give a chance for failure on it since it would be entirely random.

I would do away with Smoked as an idea and just go straight to cooked, and let cooked meats last longer than raw meats.

Even if poultry can't be salted (but I'm pretty sure it can be), I'd do it anyway to just maintain ease of understanding of the mechanic. I hate one-off exceptions to rules in game systems.

Harvesting from frozen animals would require dead animals with which to harvest from. That would require a lot of complexity. I think I'd rather emphasize the hunting side of things instead; there's plenty of game to shoot which can provide fresh meat as it stands.

Glad I could be of assistance, and I agree with what you say on simplifying to just salting and every meat can be salted. I couldnt find any info on my search for poultry, that not saying it doesnt exist, I just couldnt find it so I assumed there is none and you no what they say about assuming. The idea of dead animals was just a last minute idea I had that I though would be interesting but you make a good point about it.

So I take it raw meats will last a few hours, cooked meats will last a day or 2, and preserved meats will last around a week but still need to be cooked and then will only last a day or 2 afterwards?

No. I don't think you should have to account for any action a player may take. Stick with your system. Its looking good.


I'm back to using IMCN after having tried every other needs mod out there and it definitely handles spoilage the best. Like you have planned, food will spoil in the players inventory, so loading up on all the contents of the pantry wont help when food only lasts a couple days in your backpack. Hunting and foraging (GO ChaosPearl!) are sometimes needed on long journeys. The additional steps you are taking with replacing food found in the world and adding weight are excellent. Has anyone lifted a full size cheese wheel?

I lifted a half wheel of swiss, had a good bit of heft. probably weighed around 6/7 pounds. I know that wheels very in size though.