Ebrim goes foraging! (forage yield experiment 0.56 exp)

[ebrim 998]

Okay, when I crafted the fishing rod I wasn't aware that I needed a shoulder spot open. I likened it to cutting an ashwood stick. I thought the rod would fall to the ground and I could then just pick it back up. What about the rabbit snare though? Shouldn't it have appeared in my backpack? As for the fish trap, it was the first time I ever crafted one. When I held it in my hands there was no scroll option available. Same results when it was in my backpack. I even put the fish trap on my hotbar and still received no joy.

 

I've been moving away from canned goods lately, since I expect the game to become more dependent on wilderness survival. I've always hunted though and it seems things have changed there also. I remember the animals giving way more steaks then they do now, maybe the guts and the fat account for the reduction in meat? I've used the fat for cooking (in the cooking pot on a gas stove). I once ate both the guts and the fat and got pretty sick. Someone told me the fat is good to eat but after that experience I really don't want to take the chance. Maybe it was the deer guts that made me sick? Can the fat be eaten safely?

 

Thanks,

 

-Schweinsteiger.

 

- Fat can absolutely be eaten raw (for now) and it's usually the first bit I eat, I like to think of it as a special treat. :D (it dehydrates you a little)

 

- I actually cooked some sheep steaks yesterday in a pot and they burned quickly, maybe next time I'll try using the fat as a grease and see if that helps.

 

- Guts will absolutely make you sick though and there's no way to cook them (no sausages yet, sadly). If I have charcoal tabs on me, sometimes I'll eat the guts too if I really need the energy and the tabs will stop the food poisoning. Apparently you can combine them (guts) with plant material in a barrel and make fertilizer but I haven't tried this out yet. Guts will also dehydrate you.

 

- Rabbit snare, yes, you just need space in your backpack/pants/coat whatever. 2x1 slot open, then move it to your hands and deploy like normal.

 

- Fish trap, you need to be near the sea, you probably know that but I just want to cover everything. Drag the fish trap to your hands, then drag a worm onto the fish trap in your hands. Wade into the sea, maybe to about knee level and keep scrolling, eventually you'll see an option to deploy it. Within not very long when you pick up the fish trap there'll be sardines inside waiting for you. Sadly, when I ate them raw they both caused food poisoning and didn't seem to give me much nutrition. Another thing about fish traps, I have difficulty seeing them in the water when I go to pick them up, so I try to deploy them while keeping in mind some sort of reference point on the beach.

Edited May 21, 2015 by Ebrim

[Schweinsteiger 107]

- Fat can absolutely be eaten raw (for now) and it's usually the first bit I eat, I like to think of it as a special treat. :D

 

- I actually cooked some sheep steaks yesterday in a pot and they burned quickly, maybe next time I'll try using the fat as a grease and see if that helps.

 

- Guts will absolutely make you sick though and there's no way to cook them (no sausages yet, sadly). If I have charcoal tabs on me, sometimes I'll eat the guts too if I really need the energy and the tabs will stop the food poisoning. Apparently you can combine them (guts) with plant material in a barrel and make fertilizer but I haven't tried this out yet.

 

- Rabbit snare, yes, you just need space in your backpack/pants/coat whatever. 2x1 slot open, then move it to your hands and deploy like normal.

 

- Fish trap, you need to be near the sea, you probably know that but I just want to cover everything. Drag the fish trap to your hands, then drag a worm onto the fish trap in your hands. Wade into the sea, maybe to about knee level and keep scrolling, eventually you'll see an option to deploy it. Within not very long when you pick up the fish trap there'll be sardines inside waiting for you. Sadly, when I ate them raw they both caused food poisoning and didn't seem to give me much nutrition.

Hey Ebrim,

 

The cooking pot needs either water or fat to work properly, that much I know for a fact, so make sure you add water or fat the next time you cook some meat (unless, of coarse, you use a sharpened stick, and if you do use the stick, make sure the weather is cold or there is a lake nearby or you will suffer from hyperthermia). Hyperthermia - I did cool down slightly by removing my jacket and that made the "very hot" notification turn to just "hot". I didn't try removing all my clothes and equipment, for fear of losing them to a glitch, but that might have worked. I stayed "hot" up until I jumped into a small pond in Novy Sobor

 

Fish trap - I didn't realize I needed to be near the sea (I was trying to fish in that small pond behind the train tracks in Kamyshovo) nor did I think of putting a worm in the trap (feel a bit stupid now). As to wading in the sea and deploying the trap. Do you have to stand right where you deploy the trap and wait, or can you walk back to shore, wait a few minutes, then walk back to the trap and check it?

 

Fishing pole - Do I need to be at the coast (the sea) or will the fishing pole work in small ponds, lakes, and rivers?

 

I appreciate the help.

[ebrim 998]

Hey Ebrim,

 

The cooking pot needs either water or fat to work properly, that much I know for a fact, so make sure you add water or fat the next time you cook some meat (unless, of coarse, you use a sharpened stick, and if you do use the stick, make sure the weather is cold or there is a lake nearby or you will suffer from hyperthermia). Hyperthermia - I did cool down slightly by removing my jacket and that made the "very hot" notification turn to just "hot". I didn't try removing all my clothes and equipment, for fear of losing them to a glitch, but that might have worked. I stayed "hot" up until I jumped into a small pond in Novy Sobor

 

Fish trap - I didn't realize I needed to be near the sea (I was trying to fish in that small pond behind the train tracks in Kamyshovo) nor did I think of putting a worm in the trap (feel a bit stupid now). As to wading in the sea and deploying the trap. Do you have to stand right where you deploy the trap and wait, or can you walk back to shore, wait a few minutes, then walk back to the trap and check it?

 

Fishing pole - Do I need to be at the coast (the sea) or will the fishing pole work in small ponds, lakes, and rivers?

 

I appreciate the help.

 

It's my pleasure. Also, I'll make sure to grease/water my pot next time. :)

 

Fishing rod only works in fresh water*. As for the fish trap, you don't have to be near it, in fact it's probably better that you wander off for a few minutes and come back.

 

*For now, I understand there's a model for a sea fish but it's not implemented yet, so we'll see.

Edited May 21, 2015 by Ebrim

[Schweinsteiger 107]

Awesome!

 

By the way, the fat lasts when you cook with it. I think each use depletes it by 20%. The large gas canisters will cook steaks faster then the small ones. I burnt my steaks because I used the large canister for too long (I believe they would have been done by using less then 15% of the large canister). Next time I use the large canister I'll check the meat frequently. I'm thinking when 10% of the fuel has been used the steaks should be cooked perfectly. Either way, I need to time it so I have a good idea of how long it takes depending on what I am using. I do know that crops take about 20 minutes to mature. Good tip concerning the plan material. Now I understand why it didn't work when I tried to add it to the farming tiles.

[Whyherro123 2283]

On Animals, hunting, and food

 

So, IMO, hunting should be harder.  Much harder. I know hunters that have gone years without taking a deer, and this is with a rifle.

 

In real life, hunters and hunting was often deified, due to the difficulty involved. Most people were foragers, or after agriculture was developed, farmers.

 

Most of our food should come from either foraged plants (it is eminently possible to survive that way, just with effort and time), or farmed produce (also with effort and time). Ideally, the survivor would do all three: plant a garden to guarantee future supply, forage fruits, berries, and other plants around their camp, and hunt and trap in their free time. That is what "ancient peoples" did : they didn't limit themselves to one method of food procurement

 

Right now in Day Z, you can practically walk to within 30 feet of an animal to kill it. Hell, with some planning, you can kill an animal with a melee weapon!

 

So, the animals should be harder to hunt. Not necessarily rarer, but more difficult to find. You would have to spot the animal from a distance away (200m?), track it, then apply the killing blow

 

On the flipside, animals should provide much more "resources", not just a couple of steaks, some guts, and some hides. It would take a decently-sized group a couple of days to completely eat a medium-sized deer, and a rabbit can fill up a single person handily.

 

Lean Meat: The "steaks". This should be the majority of the resources from the kill, to a level where you alone can't eat all the meat of a deer before it goes bad. You would want to preserve this, either in the form of jerky or pemmican

 

Organ Meat: high in vitamins and nutrients, something you don't want to skip over, unappealing as they might be to modern tastes

 

Intestines: "Guts". Useful not only as rope (in reality, I would use intestines as cordage last due to their other uses), but as waterproof containers and food (make sausages with lean meat, fat, and blood, then stuff them into intestines. Put them into just-off-the-boil water, then smoke them for flavor and preservation)

 

Marrow: inside the bones, marrow is the premier "survival food". You want to eat this, if you don't eat anything else. It will keep you going like nothing else.

 

Blood: drink it, or let it separate, pour off the plasma, and use the leftovers as soup thickeners.

 

Fat: eat it, or use it as waterproofing for clothing, or rub it on exposed skin to protect from cold or wind

 

Bones: knives, arrowheads, fishing gorges, sewing awls and needles, all very useful

 

Hides/furs: self explanatort\y. With the brain of an animal, you can tan hides without fertilizer, and with bone tools you can sew together some leather clothing without going into town.

 

EDIT: will finish later.

 

DISCUSS

[Coheed_IV 381]

When the new animal AI was introduced, their spook radius was much larger. But, it was like they took animals out, and we never saw many, because they would hear us running. I'm betting it goes back closer to this, but with some changes. Group behavior will help spotting from distance, then you'll be able to plan accordingly. Tracking hopefully gets some attention too (animal companions or in other ways (like finding scat).

Domestic animals seem fine with the current spook radius. In fact, cows seem too suspicious.

[ebrim 998]

So weirdest thing:

 

I decided I'd try some walking/jogging/sprinting trials from newspawn to starving status (death? not sure yet) and decided to suicide my 3pp character with a landmine I was carrying.

 

So I setup the landmine, safely back away and hit activate.

 

Then there are messages: "landmine active in 3"..."2..."..."1..." "landmine is active".

 

Firstly, I'd never seen this before so that's cool but I still want to kill myself. So I run forward, run over the landmine and.... I get a red message: "you've been hurt by a landmine" but I noticed really no damage to speak of. There was no explosion. Must be something they're testing. Very cool though. I still put my blaze under my chin though and pulled the trigger.

 

Let the walking/jogging/sprinting begin!

 

I posted this in the wrong thread, could a wonderful mod delete it please?

Edited May 21, 2015 by Ebrim

[Schweinsteiger 107]

On Animals, hunting, and food

 

So, IMO, hunting should be harder.  Much harder. I know hunters that have gone years without taking a deer, and this is with a rifle.

 

In real life, hunters and hunting was often deified, due to the difficulty involved. Most people were foragers, or after agriculture was developed, farmers.

 

Most of our food should come from either foraged plants (it is eminently possible to survive that way, just with effort and time), or farmed produce (also with effort and time). Ideally, the survivor would do all three: plant a garden to guarantee future supply, forage fruits, berries, and other plants around their camp, and hunt and trap in their free time. That is what "ancient peoples" did : they didn't limit themselves to one method of food procurement

 

Right now in Day Z, you can practically walk to within 30 feet of an animal to kill it. Hell, with some planning, you can kill an animal with a melee weapon!

 

So, the animals should be harder to hunt. Not necessarily rarer, but more difficult to find. You would have to spot the animal from a distance away (200m?), track it, then apply the killing blow

 

On the flipside, animals should provide much more "resources", not just a couple of steaks, some guts, and some hides. It would take a decently-sized group a couple of days to completely eat a medium-sized deer, and a rabbit can fill up a single person handily.

 

Lean Meat: The "steaks". This should be the majority of the resources from the kill, to a level where you alone can't eat all the meat of a deer before it goes bad. You would want to preserve this, either in the form of jerky or pemmican

 

Organ Meat: high in vitamins and nutrients, something you don't want to skip over, unappealing as they might be to modern tastes

 

Intestines: "Guts". Useful not only as rope (in reality, I would use intestines as cordage last due to their other uses), but as waterproof containers and food (make sausages with lean meat, fat, and blood, then stuff them into intestines. Put them into just-off-the-boil water, then smoke them for flavor and preservation)

 

Marrow: inside the bones, marrow is the premier "survival food". You want to eat this, if you don't eat anything else. It will keep you going like nothing else.

 

Blood: drink it, or let it separate, pour off the plasma, and use the leftovers as soup thickeners.

 

Fat: eat it, or use it as waterproofing for clothing, or rub it on exposed skin to protect from cold or wind

 

Bones: knives, arrowheads, fishing gorges, sewing awls and needles, all very useful

 

Hides/furs: self explanatort\y. With the brain of an animal, you can tan hides without fertilizer, and with bone tools you can sew together some leather clothing without going into town.

 

EDIT: will finish later.

 

DISCUSS

The prime source for cordage would be from sinew (for bows and arrows, sewing leather together, etc.). Native Americans would use intestines as a foodstuff (Lakota men would each take an end of the Buffalo's intestine and start eating to see who could reach the center first). The intestine of the Buffalo were prized because they were filled with sweet grass and were tasty.

 

Hunting - I agree, it could be harder but it all depends on the encounter. If the animal sees or smells you first then the difficulty increases. If you see the animal first then the opposite may be true. The key word is "may", because it all depends on the situation. If you're hiding in the bush (whether it be a tree or an actual bush, rocks, brush, etc.) then you have a huge advantage if an animal wonders by. If you're in a field without any real cover it may be much more difficult to stalk the animal. In real life hunting can be both easy and hard, it all depends on the situation.

 

Resources from the animal you kill - I'm not sure how far the devs plan to take things but it would be nice to have a more sophisticated system to deal with all the different uses of a particular animal. So far, what we can do with tanned hides are very limited. I'd love to be able to craft a sheath for a hunting knife, a larger water bladder, things like that. We should definitely get more meat, and we should be able to make Wasna (also called pemmican) and smoke the meat, dry it for jerky, etc.

 

Good ideas all around I think. The map is going to need to be expanded at some point so we can make realistic camps, and with a larger map comes more people per server too (just as they have been testing in .56).

 

-Schweinsteiger.

Edited May 21, 2015 by Schweinsteiger