Ethan Beaty

Description and concept images: https://vivid-dragon-63e.notion.site/Root-Cellar-Stashes-c7ebb02a849741e9b6cdee6fa1afe779

After the recent updates to cooking and stoves as well as gardening, and with the expansive array of foods and cooking methods in the game, a “Stew” system would fit perfectly. There is a huge variety of meats, fish, vegetables, mushrooms, and fruits, each with several methods of cooking and many cool textures/values that most players likely don’t experience. Currently the three cooking forms are: Baking = Max Nutrition, Smoking = Max Preservation, and Boiling, which serves little purpose in comparison. Boiling a mix of ingredients could create (perhaps multiple varieties of) stew in the pot. While the boiled ingredients would have much less calories than baked ones (similar to how fat loses calories when it is used to bake steak) and would go bad much faster than smoked ones, the remaining “water” (tag that discerns water, gasoline, etc. could be changed to “stew”) in the pot would be nutritious and give lots of calories. Balancing could go many different directions, but the end result should reward the player with proportionally more nutrition since it requires much more preparation to find or produce many ingredients then to shoot one animal. Obviously if you cook a whole animal’s worth of meat then that would give you more nutrition than one pot of stew, but each piece of meat should get more mileage in a stew. Stew could potentially give a “heat buff” similar to a campfire when consumed. The amount consumed would equal the duration/strength of the buff, so having a pot of stew before walking through the rain or giving each member of your squad a few sips of stew before crossing a river could be a fun objective for players. Maybe there would be a requirement for variety in order to create stew, so three pieces of beef wouldn’t make a “stew” if boiled. Maybe each item has to be different, e.g. One piece of venison, one peeled potato, sardines, and a mushroom. This would promote the already robust gardening/foraging/hunting/trapping systems that aren’t currently promoted/META, and expose players to all the cool types of food and methods of obtaining them. If the feature went SUPER in-depth then each ingredient could be scaled with different values like calories, hydration, health regeneration, body temperature regulation, or even medicinal effects, like a buff to immunity similar to multi-vitamins. So a beef-pork-carp-potato stew might give you a bunch of calories and warmth, but a pepper-mushroom-zucchini-plum stew might boost your immune system and prevent fever, or even reduce the severity of coughing/sneezing/blurred vision/flinching. A few items could be added to the game to support this feature, such as a few different types of pots with different capacities to add variety, or seasonings/mixes you could find that could replace an ingredient or add an effect. Elderberries and rose hips could be added back because they would have functionality in a stew. The addition of stew would also revitalize features of the game that are often neglected or too much hassle to be enjoyed by the majority of the player base, like the use of the camping tripod, stone-oven, or Camp stove and gas canister. This feature would also be great for all types of players. With some preparation, a PvPer could be rewarded with various buffs and the best source of calories and hydration in a relatively space-efficient way, and of course there is nothing more RP than being able to gather around a fire and make a stew with your friends or tend to a garden for the ingredients necessary for the stew. Potential Ingredients: venison, pork, beef, chevron, bear, wolf, boar, chicken, rabbit,(human?), mackerel, carp, sardines, bitterlings, worm?, potato, pepper, zucchini, tomatoes, pumpkin, apple, pear, plum, (rose hip/elder berry?), and 8 types of mushroom.

So excited for Livonia. Hopefully it will release by my Thanksgiving break on the 25th. There are plenty of bugs that should be addressed accordingly, but the biggest issue is with the cap on AR spawns. So many players are able to stash all the ARs on a server, really hindering the replayabilty. I only enjoy this game when I have a motivation to play it (high tier loot that will actually spawn). Obviously this won’t be a problem at launch, but it will certainly be the weeks following. Also, I really appreciate the focus on survival. Quite a treat for the veterans that have mastered chernarus. Personally, I wish placed tents could protect you from rain, especially if there won’t be shelter in the south.