Balancing Food Gathering

[Very Ape 748]

A suggestion that would hopefully balance the way players choose to get food, depending on their skills and circumstances. As it is now, players can very easily gather food in supermarkets, and can easily find animals to kill for insane amounts of food.

There are two distinct ways of gathering food; hunting and scavenging. Here's my suggestion to balance things out:

1) Make scavenging more difficult by reducing canned food spawns, and making navigating cities more dangerous. Upping the danger zombies represent would contribute to making scavenging a risky venture, but easier for someone who isn't a seasoned hunter.

2) Make hunting more difficult by removing most farm animals (cows should be a very rare, but very easy target). The rest would flee if you just started sprinting into the woods, unless you spot them from a mile away. Otherwise, they should be able to hear you coming and scatter. If I want to hunt for food, I should have to be stealthy. No more blindly charging through the woods and killing a boar at point blank range with a pistol.

3) Food items such as canned foods should be less nutritious, so to speak, filling you up for some time but not completely if famished. And they would give no blood, as per usual. Easy to acquire, and in greater quantities-- but not too easy, and the quality is sub-par.

4) Meat should completely nourish and restore a small amount of blood. Raw meats would spoil if uncooked for some time, and cooked meats would have to be somehow preserved to last longer than a day, reducing their effect slightly but making it still more nourishing than canned food. Meat would be harder to come across, so only professional survivalists would go for it.

Edited December 21, 2012 by Very Ape

[Heathcz 84]

Agreed.

[Bribase 251]

I would love to see hunting build in complexity to the point where specialist players can spend a lot of their time stalking and killing animals for food, then trading it for weapons and equipment. Killing animals should be something that can still be done in passing like taking out the odd rabbit while playing but to make meat your primary source of food should take time and dedication. This should be improved by the ability to set snares along with the bear traps. The evasion behaviour of animals ought to be very simple to code since it doesn't require much beyond configuring their LOS properly and reversing the zombies' attraction to noise to repulsion from it. Some interesting ideas can be gleaned from The Hunter 2012 like the use of pheromones and animal calls to attract prey:

It would be interesting to see players think of weapons like compound bows and modern sighted crossbows as more than stealthy ways to dispatch other players, they are essentially the key to start a business or to keep a squad fit and healthy. Being an accomplished hunter/trader could even make a player one of the most important individuals on a server, relied on by everyone to keep fed and possibly even above the violence and petty squabbles between competing squads.

As for keeping meat from spoiling I guess that in a post apocalyptic scenario like this one we would go back to rubbing it with salt and hanging it until it dries. This could have it's own drawbacks like attracting feral dog packs, looking for an easy meal.

[Very Ape 748]

As for keeping meat from spoiling I guess that in a post apocalyptic scenario like this one we would go back to rubbing it with salt and hanging it until it dries. This could have it's own drawbacks like attracting feral dog packs, looking for an easy meal.

I'd like to say that I love your reply, it's very constructive and builds a lot on this suggestion. I especially love the animal calls; it'd be nice if this were implemented, it'd already add quite a bit of depth. Imagine hearing one and thinking: Is this a hunter or an elk? xD

As for the feral dogs-- perhaps you should formally suggest this? It's a damn good idea.

I always imagined raw meat as being a viable way of attracting zombies. Perhaps the very act of just carrying raw meat would make you more attractive to zombies? But imagine hanging a steak on someone's car while he's looting tents.

Edited December 22, 2012 by Very Ape

[Dylanco1 10]

This should be added but the Scent of Human blood would attract them no-other so gutting a Human would give a Raw meat that increases the Smell Radius of you or whatever its in/Stuck on and Gutting the Infected and wearing their Fleshs masks your scent but doing anything other than walking (Unless they are running themselves) breaks your cover and forces you to sprint like all hell instead of being Glenn and Rick before the rain which would also remove the smell boost and Smell Reduction