Food scarcity is good; Caloric value and time to starve is not

[Badwolvie 13]

Food scarcity is great. It forces players to move, try new towns, grow a garden, hunt and fish. Sometimes it even helps payers interact in the form of sharing a can or two with a stranger. What sucks currently, is just how terrible food's caloric value is. I mean one human in DayZ could eat a side of cow, an entire garden, and seven cans of peaches, and they would still be hungry. That just ain't right. Not only ain't it right, its down right silly.

A general rule of survival is the rule of 3's. Humans  can die of exposure after 3 hours of no shelter. Humans could die of dehydration after 3 days with no water. Humans could starve to death after three weeks of no food. Sure, there's lots of factors that go into survival, and environment, body type, overall health etc can wildly change the way those basic needs play out, but its still a good thing to keep in mind in survival situations. So why is it that we can't travel 100 kilometers in DayZ without starving to death?

Today I spawned on the cost just south of Solnichniy. I spent a brief amount of time in town looking for food, but it had clearly been wiped out. I ate my spawn plum and headed west towards Dolina. Straight shot, not sprinting, preserving stamina, and I barely made it to Dolina before completely starving to death. That is just down right silly.

Obviously the game cant have us living off of one can of beans a week, but there should be a better level of "needs" so we aren't consuming a comically high amount of food items. Surely, there has to be a middle ground between "I ate one pea today and I feel great" and "HOLY HELL I JUST ATE A WHOLE HERD OF CATTLE AND THAT WAS JUST THE APPETIZER!"

 

 

[drgullen 596]

8 hours ago, Badwolvie said:

So why is it that we can't travel 100 kilometers in DayZ without starving to death?

Because it's not real life, it's a game.

It is for this reason we can turn pumpkin seeds into pumpkins and eat them same day -- it's a game.  It is for this reason that you can be bleeding in 5 places and bandage those wounds in about a minute -- it's a game.  It is for this reason that you can filet a carp into two perfect carp steaks in about 5 seconds -- it's a game.  You can't do any of those things in real life that quickly.

Since we've established now that it's a game, one of the aspects of playing a game is the concept of losing the game.  Back when I was a lad, one of my favorite arcade games was Joust and in that game, sometimes I jousted my opponent and collected his egg and sometimes he jousted me and I died.  In DayZ, sometimes you find the food and live on and sometimes you starve to death.

Now, in 1.09, it is harder to survive somewhat in that due to the changes with the loot timers, it can be extremely difficult sometimes to find something to open cans with, so unless you get lucky, yes, you might die of starvation.  Think about it though, if an apocalypse situation happened IRL, the same would apply -- it would take much longer, but unless you had some luck on your side, you might eventually starve to death.

As for your last capitalized sentence, you are really exaggerating there.  By cooking and eating just one piece of fat from a cow (and they typically produce 2 pieces each time), you can go for about an hour (and longer without sprinting) without having to eat again.  This is not to mention the steaks they produce which also provide great sustenance, so cooking and eating all the meat and fat from one cow should be enough food for your entire play session for that character.

[liquidsnake 275]

1 hour ago, drgullen said:

Because it's not real life, it's a game.

It is for this reason we can turn pumpkin seeds into pumpkins and eat them same day -- it's a game.  It is for this reason that you can be bleeding in 5 places and bandage those wounds in about a minute -- it's a game.  It is for this reason that you can filet a carp into two perfect carp steaks in about 5 seconds -- it's a game.  You can't do any of those things in real life that quickly.

Since we've established now that it's a game, one of the aspects of playing a game is the concept of losing the game.  Back when I was a lad, one of my favorite arcade games was Joust and in that game, sometimes I jousted my opponent and collected his egg and sometimes he jousted me and I died.  In DayZ, sometimes you find the food and live on and sometimes you starve to death.

Now, in 1.09, it is harder to survive somewhat in that due to the changes with the loot timers, it can be extremely difficult sometimes to find something to open cans with, so unless you get lucky, yes, you might die of starvation.  Think about it though, if an apocalypse situation happened IRL, the same would apply -- it would take much longer, but unless you had some luck on your side, you might eventually starve to death.

As for your last capitalized sentence, you are really exaggerating there.  By cooking and eating just one piece of fat from a cow (and they typically produce 2 pieces each time), you can go for about an hour (and longer without sprinting) without having to eat again.  This is not to mention the steaks they produce which also provide great sustenance, so cooking and eating all the meat and fat from one cow should be enough food for your entire play session for that character.

I'd disagree. My last character got lucky and found a pumpkin another player had left behind, killed another recently spawned player for their plum (yes, that's how bad it is) and hunted and cooked a chicken. I died of starvation 5 minutes after eating the chicken, which only got me to yellow food and went down to red literally one minute later. Barely lasted an hour in total. Even getting lucky is not enough to survive at the moment. I wouldn't at all call that realistic, which is what this game strives to be. Food scarcity is great, but what you find/grow/cook ought to keep you fed for longer (depending on what it is). Nowadays this game is already plagued by mostly artificial things to manage (like shoes getting ruined and causing you to bleed to death, so you have to keep moving to find new pairs or repair kits, knives and other tools getting ruined unrealistically fast and more), food is not something we need to add to that list. Keeping food realistic can already be a nice challenge, if done right. 

[Parazight 1599]

5 hours ago, liquidsnake said:

I'd disagree. My last character got lucky and found a pumpkin another player had left behind, killed another recently spawned player for their plum (yes, that's how bad it is) and hunted and cooked a chicken. I died of starvation 5 minutes after eating the chicken, which only got me to yellow food and went down to red literally one minute later. Barely lasted an hour in total. Even getting lucky is not enough to survive at the moment. I wouldn't at all call that realistic, which is what this game strives to be. Food scarcity is great, but what you find/grow/cook ought to keep you fed for longer (depending on what it is). Nowadays this game is already plagued by mostly artificial things to manage (like shoes getting ruined and causing you to bleed to death, so you have to keep moving to find new pairs or repair kits, knives and other tools getting ruined unrealistically fast and more), food is not something we need to add to that list. Keeping food realistic can already be a nice challenge, if done right. 

Ok, maybe you didn't get lucky.  And it's not really meant to be realistic.  Food takes A LOT longer to grow in real life.  There is meant to be video game balance.

Related, you can stick to one official server and begin to remember where the player made gardens are at.   These gardens stick around a lot longer than they have in the past.  Maybe at some point, servers will be overrun with food because survivors will plant more gardens and animals will be plentiful.

15 hours ago, Badwolvie said:

I mean one human in DayZ could eat a side of cow, an entire garden, and seven cans of peaches, and they would still be hungry.

This isn't even close to what happens in game.

15 hours ago, Badwolvie said:

Today I spawned on the cost just south of Solnichniy. I spent a brief amount of time in town looking for food, but it had clearly been wiped out. I ate my spawn plum and headed west towards Dolina. Straight shot, not sprinting, preserving stamina, and I barely made it to Dolina before completely starving to death.

Then you must be doing it wrong.  If you hang out in Solnichniy you can search for ambient spawned fruits/rocks.  Fill up a bit, make your way north.  Find some gardens or kill some animals.  I've done this several times successfully, on multiple servers.  Perhaps you haven't figured out the best way to survive yet.

[Badwolvie 13]

6 minutes ago, Parazight said:

This isn't even close to what happens in game.

 

I'm glad you successfully identified hyperbole 😄

[Badwolvie 13]

7 hours ago, drgullen said:

Because it's not real life, it's a game. 

 

Wow! I appreciate that information, I was really struggling to understand the fine line between the physical realm and a digital space representing an apocalyptic reality! I will make sure to go and take my critiques of a system which in my opinion is poorly balanced, and make sure to only apply such discussions to real life systems. When do you think Life patch 2.0 might be deployed? Maybe we can ask the life devs if they would be interested in implementing things like the ability to fly, never sleep, and breathing under water?

[drgullen 596]

10 hours ago, liquidsnake said:

I died of starvation 5 minutes after eating the chicken, which only got me to yellow food and went down to red literally one minute later. Barely lasted an hour in total.

I think most people don't understand the energy icon (i.e. "the apple").  I think most are under the impression that you're only in trouble once it turns red.  I admit, it's a poor implementation by Bohemia, I liked the messages we had in .62 and prior much better.

In a nutshell, you spawn in already hungry (apple is white, but missing a sliver at the top).  When it turns yellow, you are beginning to starve.  When it turns red, you are now starving to death.  When it flashes red, you've exhausted all stored energy and your death is imminent.

I've also seen it time and again in videos and on streams -- people eat something, see three white arrows going up on the apple and figure they're good, so they stop eating.  You said you ate some pumpkin, a plum and two chicken breasts but did so when you were already starving to death.  This is nowhere near enough food in that condition and in my opinion, that system works as is.

As a new spawn, hydration and energy must be your first thoughts.  You should not be sprinting at all at first because the consumption of energy will be less by not sprinting.  You should only start sprinting when your apple is full white AND you are three white arrows up.

The only thing full white apple means is that you're not hungry.  It does NOT mean that you're fully energized -- you are far from it in fact.  Even with full white apple, you should still keep eating regularly.  The weirdest part of these icons is the indicator that you are fully energized -- that happens when you see a single arrow on the full white apple flipping between one up and one down constantly.  At that point, you can go quite a while without eating a thing and you'd still be full white apple.

[Badwolvie 13]

2 hours ago, drgullen said:

 “ You said you ate some pumpkin, a plum and two chicken breasts but did so when you were already starving to death.  This is nowhere near enough food in that condition and in my opinion, that system works as is.”

 

That’s so much food though, I mean it’s almost comical how that wouldn’t be considered enough to stave off starvation.

Edited September 20, 2020 by Badwolvie
Quotation error/mobile issues

[drgullen 596]

9 hours ago, Badwolvie said:

That’s so much food though, I mean it’s almost comical how that wouldn’t be considered enough to stave off starvation.

Well first of all, I apologize for the sarcasm earlier.  This kind of highlights the point, though.  IRL, if you were starving to death, this much food would probably get you by for a little while, but since this is a game, eating and drinking are part of the mechanics (i.e. things you do in game), so it makes sense to me that you'd have to do these things more often than you would IRL.  I think most people get into trouble because of the color coding, meaning white I'm good, yellow I better think about eating soon, red oh shit I better find some food quick.  The instant your apple turns yellow is the "oh shit" moment in fact.

Hydration in game is similar.  Most people don't drink anywhere near enough water when they arrive at a well.  Depending on your hydration level, it could take 30 sips or more to have the stomach full icon appear and that's what you should be doing btw -- drink 'till your stomach is full.  I've watched so many people just take 3 or 4 sips and then leave because they see three white arrows up on a yellow bottle indicator.  Like the apple, a yellow bottle means you are already dehydrated.  You are only considered "not thirsty" when your bottle is full white, but again like the energy, that doesn't mean you're fully hydrated.  It's a similar mechanic there, full white bottle with one arrow bouncing between up and down means full hydration.

[kopo79 426]

Player is jogging every where so maybe its almost balanced that you need all that food and water. 

Only thing what should be tweaked is that yellow state could Last much longer.... Also when player is limping, it should take much More time To death. 

If player is limping, there is no hope anymore. Its faster to suicide than struggle... So... Maybe limping should start if your hunger is yellow? 

[liquidsnake 275]

On 9/20/2020 at 5:40 AM, drgullen said:

I think most people don't understand the energy icon (i.e. "the apple").  I think most are under the impression that you're only in trouble once it turns red.  I admit, it's a poor implementation by Bohemia, I liked the messages we had in .62 and prior much better.

In a nutshell, you spawn in already hungry (apple is white, but missing a sliver at the top).  When it turns yellow, you are beginning to starve.  When it turns red, you are now starving to death.  When it flashes red, you've exhausted all stored energy and your death is imminent.

I've also seen it time and again in videos and on streams -- people eat something, see three white arrows going up on the apple and figure they're good, so they stop eating.  You said you ate some pumpkin, a plum and two chicken breasts but did so when you were already starving to death.  This is nowhere near enough food in that condition and in my opinion, that system works as is.

As a new spawn, hydration and energy must be your first thoughts.  You should not be sprinting at all at first because the consumption of energy will be less by not sprinting.  You should only start sprinting when your apple is full white AND you are three white arrows up.

The only thing full white apple means is that you're not hungry.  It does NOT mean that you're fully energized -- you are far from it in fact.  Even with full white apple, you should still keep eating regularly.  The weirdest part of these icons is the indicator that you are fully energized -- that happens when you see a single arrow on the full white apple flipping between one up and one down constantly.  At that point, you can go quite a while without eating a thing and you'd still be full white apple.

No, I ate the plum, chicken and pumpkin spread out over the course of about 30-40 minutes surviving. I ate the plum as soon as my food sat went yellow, I ate the pumpkin as soon as it went yellow again and then searched for food, which I finally found in the form of a chicken when my food was red. The rest of the story I told already.

Finding the food is not even the problem, I just now died again of dehydration 10 minutes after drinking an entire bottle of water and eating two cans of tuna, a can of sardines, a beef steak and 2 chicken breasts. I was sick, so there's that, but what happened this time is my stomach got full after trying to keep my food/water in white a few hours ago. And this led to a rather comical situation, because while my stomach was full my food and water went down so fast that before I could eat more I already was starving again. So over the course of several hours I spent managing my food by eating or drinking a little bit (just what I could without vomiting) whenever a few minutes had passed. This caused m food stat to permanently go from yellow to red to yellow and back again. I had on me 2 chicken breasts, a steak, and found 4 cans of tuna, 1 can of sardines, a can of peaches and a water bottle that I refilled. Within the space of about 2 hours I ate all of this and drank in total 3 refilled bottles of water, everytime only ingesting what I could without vomiting, but I constantly kept my food/water at yellow. Eventually I had just finished my third bottle of water and after being yellow for 1 minute my water stat went red again. So at this point I start eating the food I have left because at this time I had no water pump near me. That was at that point the aforementioned 2 chicken breasts, a steak, 2 cans of tuna and a can of sardines (meaning in the previous hour or so I ate a can of peaches, 2 cans of tuna and drank 3 water bottles). By this point my stomach was no longer stuffed, so I ate the cans I had left and noticed after each can my water stat only went to yellow and then almost immediately back to red, so I proceeded to build a campfire immediately after. My health was full at that point, but by the time I could start roasting the meat I was already at yellow health. I had just entered red health (still red hydration, not empty because I kept it filled with cans) when my steak was ready. Ate the steak, hydration never even left red this time. Cooked the chicken, health still red when done, ate it and again hydration didn't even leave red. Health went flashing just as I started cooking the last chicken and I was dead just as I could eat it. But it wouldn't have made a difference anyway. But hey, after spending the last hour eating 4 cans of tuna, 1 can of sardines, 2 chicken breasts, a can of peaches and a steak, my food stat was finally full (yes, up until I ate the steak my food stat was never full and even alternated between yellow white and sometimes red)! 

In real life, humans can survive up to a literal month without food before dying of starvation and 3 days without water. If said human is actively searching for food and burning calories, that number might go down to 2 weeks or MAYBE 1 week if exceptionally active. In this game starvation happens in the space of 30 minutes or so. It is absolutely ridiculous. I like the new loot system wherein it's difficult to find weapons and other loot, but the food system is utterly broken and I don't see how anyone can even defend this meme. The human body doesn't die of starvation until it has used up all its reserves, which means that before the body has used up all fat and muscles and a human is literally reduced to skin and bones (I guess we've all seen pictures of starving humans at some point, for example holocaust pictures) we actually don't die but instead progressively weaken until there is nothing left to burn. Now think of how long it takes to go from a healthy human to that and that is how long it takes to starve to death. The fact that people like Gandhi could voluntarily fast 21 days out of protest multiple times in their lives, yet in game I die because while stocked with meat I took 5 mins too long building a campfire is ridiculous and indefensible. Make food extremely hard to find if you insist on making it a challenge, but don't do this.

[liquidsnake 275]

On 9/22/2020 at 3:21 PM, kopo79 said:

Player is jogging every where so maybe its almost balanced that you need all that food and water. 

Only thing what should be tweaked is that yellow state could Last much longer.... Also when player is limping, it should take much More time To death. 

If player is limping, there is no hope anymore. Its faster to suicide than struggle... So... Maybe limping should start if your hunger is yellow? 

I think having players limp early but for a much longer time is a good idea. It could simulate how after a few days of not eating we can still move on just fine, yet don't have the energy to go around running for food. The limping itself could prove a challenge, which I'm up for. 

[Parazight 1599]

1 hour ago, liquidsnake said:

I was sick, so there's that

This is the reason you had so many issues.  Maybe you had salmonella and cholera.

Once you become experienced in finding food, managing hunger/thirst, and avoid getting sick it's reasonable.

On 9/19/2020 at 5:59 PM, Badwolvie said:

I'm glad you successfully identified hyperbole

THANKS!!  I guarantee that you'll win the nobel prize for logic.

[liquidsnake 275]

7 hours ago, Parazight said:

This is the reason you had so many issues.  Maybe you had salmonella and cholera.

Once you become experienced in finding food, managing hunger/thirst, and avoid getting sick it's reasonable.

I got sick either by drinking from a pump well or because I was cold as a fresh spawn. Either way not much I could have done. And managing hunger/thirst, while certainly possible (which is not what I'm complaining about), is absolutely not reasonable because starvation happens about 720 times faster than it does in real life. I get that the game needs to be a challenge to have it be fun, but the correct way to get that done is to stay within certain bounds of realism. Because making things challenging for the sake of having a challenge even though it makes zero sense is not fun. Instead of making starvation comically fast, food could be more rare or a limp could set in that lasts a lot longer and hampers looting/PvP. And most importantly, healing is also way too fast.

Right now the game is no fun to me. Not because managing food is difficult; I know how to source food, but simply because the way starvation is currently implemented as something you have to constantly manage and plan for even on short treks breaks immersion in a really bad way. I like challenges, but I don't like exaggerated and unrealistic tasks that make the survival experience feel fake. It breaks immersion in a way that makes me want to stop playing. I've been playing DayZ since the mod and I can actually say that I've never had this little fun playing the game. 

[Parazight 1599]

32 minutes ago, liquidsnake said:

because the way starvation is currently implemented as something you have to constantly manage

Dealing with starvation is not something you have to constantly manage continuously.  There are many ways to avoid getting sick and having to deal with constant health maintenance.  If this upkeep is what's keeping you from playing then you might be doing something wrong.  It shouldn't be a constant challenge.

 

It seems that you haven't mastered the current mechanics.

10 hours ago, liquidsnake said:

So over the course of several hours I spent managing my food by eating or drinking a little bit (just what I could without vomiting)

This indicates that you had more than just a cold.  You made a serious mistake, like eating with bloody hands.  This is why your hydration and hunger are so difficult right now.  Wash your hands as soon as possible.  Don't drink out of containers that you just find lying around without dumping them out and refilling at a well.  Go indoors when it's raining.  Don't sprint.  Seriously, I've respawned several times around Chernarus and Livonia and the pve struggle is not bad.

Good luck.

[liquidsnake 275]

15 hours ago, Parazight said:

Dealing with starvation is not something you have to constantly manage continuously.  There are many ways to avoid getting sick and having to deal with constant health maintenance.  If this upkeep is what's keeping you from playing then you might be doing something wrong.  It shouldn't be a constant challenge.

 

It seems that you haven't mastered the current mechanics.

This indicates that you had more than just a cold.  You made a serious mistake, like eating with bloody hands.  This is why your hydration and hunger are so difficult right now.  Wash your hands as soon as possible.  Don't drink out of containers that you just find lying around without dumping them out and refilling at a well.  Go indoors when it's raining.  Don't sprint.  Seriously, I've respawned several times around Chernarus and Livonia and the pve struggle is not bad.

Good luck.

I already told you, the challenge is not a problem for me. I'm giving anecdotes of a few fresh spawns that didn't end well. Regarding sickness, I did nothing out of the ordinary. That particular fresh spawn I was cold at the start (played at night), but for the rest nothing special. Washed my hands, only drank from wells. Only ate directly from cans, prepared meat or drank water from wells either directly or poured into a bottle. The extreme rate at which hydration went down definitely seemed to be of cholera or something in that order, but the only place I could have contacted that would be a well as that is the only source I drank from (and if I did have cholera, IRL that is simply treated with sugar water to stay hydrated and energised. That I did insofar my stomach allowed for it). However I was coughing and sneezing so it was a cold, which also checked out with how I started out in the cold state as a freshie. I'm also fairly sure I got sick before I even found the water bottle. It was the first time I was sick in a very long while so I don't have a habit of becoming sick either and I'm no expert at diagnosing exactly what I had. Might have been both a cold and cholera. No rain, no sprinting. Again, my complaint is not the difficulty and I can survive just fine. But the complete lack of realism in the hunger stat atm is just no fun to me. Every time I see my food stat go to yellow and despite being absolutely loaded with meat and at full health I know if I don't build a campfire right now I'll literally starve to death, my immersion is ruined. Every time I see my food stat go to yellow maybe half an hour after eating something and I know I'm going to die in 20 or so minutes if i don't eat something, my mind goes "this bullshit again". Same if my boots are damaged after an hour long hike and I know I'll literally bleed to death if I don't go searching for new ones (lol) "this bullshit again" or my knife is damaged after the fifth time I use it "this bullshit again". But since those were just small elements of the game I never really cared too much. But this one just goes too far. Just the idea of starving to death in the space of half an hour is such complete and utter nonsense that the survival element of this game (which is the main reason I play it) loses all sense of realism and with that all value. But the loot system changes are pretty good though. Only having one shot in my double barrel for self-defence while looting NWAF was fun.

It's a shame the game took this course, because there are many ways to have survival be challenging in a more realistic way. The loot changes seem an interesting step in the right direction, but the food system is broken. Not in an "I can't play" kind of way, but in a "what is this bullshit" kind of way.

Edited September 27, 2020 by liquidsnake

[drgullen 596]

25 minutes ago, liquidsnake said:

Again, my complaint is not the difficulty and I can survive just fine. But the complete lack of realism in the hunger stat atm is just no fun to me.

 

25 minutes ago, liquidsnake said:

Same if my boots are damaged after an hour long hike and I know I'll literally bleed to death if I don't go searching for new ones (lol)

I think you should probably just play something else then if this is how you feel.

As @Parazight said earlier in this thread, there has to be a video game balance to IRL things.  You would never have to eat, drink or change footwear anywhere near as often if there was an apocalypse IRL, of course.  DayZ tries to simulate all the IRL things into a single play session so that you can experience aspects of an apocalypse in just a few hours, which would include your boots eventually wearing out and which would include struggles not to starve to death.

I think the hunger stat is just fine as is and if you manage your energy as a new spawn, if anything, you should get hungrier more often than you currently do because again, find one cow and cook and eat all of its meat and fat and you're golden for the rest of that play session.

I'm curious what server you play on because it seems modded to me.  I don't believe in vanilla DayZ that you can get cholera from drinking at a well (at least I never have, not even once on any 1.x version), so either you got cholera in some other fashion or perhaps you are playing on a modded server where you CAN get that and perhaps where the consumption of energy is higher than on a vanilla server.

[liquidsnake 275]

22 minutes ago, drgullen said:

 

I think you should probably just play something else then if this is how you feel.

As @Parazight said earlier in this thread, there has to be a video game balance to IRL things.  You would never have to eat, drink or change footwear anywhere near as often if there was an apocalypse IRL, of course.  DayZ tries to simulate all the IRL things into a single play session so that you can experience aspects of an apocalypse in just a few hours, which would include your boots eventually wearing out and which would include struggles not to starve to death.

I think the hunger stat is just fine as is and if you manage your energy as a new spawn, if anything, you should get hungrier more often than you currently do because again, find one cow and cook and eat all of its meat and fat and you're golden for the rest of that play session.

I'm curious what server you play on because it seems modded to me.  I don't believe in vanilla DayZ that you can get cholera from drinking at a well (at least I never have, not even once on any 1.x version), so either you got cholera in some other fashion or perhaps you are playing on a modded server where you CAN get that and perhaps where the consumption of energy is higher than on a vanilla server.

I play official, hardcore. 

Anyway, yes, the game must balance out real life survival in a way that might not always be realistic. I know this. And the devs can do this in a good or bad way. Whether we think the food choices are good or bad is a matter of opinion that we discuss here on the forums. Telling someone to stop playing the game is not really a constructive way to engage in that discussion. This is not a matter of "this is a game, so any choices you think are bad are just to be accepted and go play something else if you don't agree". It's wildly unrealistic, it's unnecessary from a gameplay perspective (as I said, there are many other ways to better simulate hunger) and I generally simply think it's a bad choice for the game. You're acting as if any choice the devs make is infallible and I can only either accept it or stop playing. This again is not a criticism towards the difficulty of survival, it's criticism towards how insanely far this is from realism while DayZ does profile itself as at least a semi-realistic suvival game. To me, this is unrealistic to such a degree that it starts being damaging to the experience. I call upon the devs to find more intuitive ways to simulate survival elements in the game, rather than just making everything from items wearing out to hunger go much quicker. It's a lazy way of implementing such things and if overdone it can seriously mess with our sense of realism. The boots and knives wearing out quick is an example of something that is unrealistic and perhaps an annoyance, yet understandable. The food system right now way oversteps it, imo. It seems like another one of those changes that is designed to keep players busy in the late game rather than actually making the late game more interesting (f.e. with helicopters or other things as high profile end game goals).

[Parazight 1599]

47 minutes ago, liquidsnake said:

I call upon the devs to find more intuitive ways to simulate survival elements in the game, rather than just making everything from items wearing out to hunger go much quicker.

Such is the nature of an open-world sandbox, with no controlled instances, where pve becomes trivial as soon as you group up with one other person.  There is no linear progression in DayZ.

[drgullen 596]

3 hours ago, liquidsnake said:

You're acting as if any choice the devs make is infallible and I can only either accept it or stop playing.

No, what I'm saying is we're almost 2 full years and 9 patches (with the 10th coming later this year) into the released version of the game.  I highly doubt Bohemia is going to suddenly change all these things you don't like about the survival aspects.  They clearly think the current setup of how a character starves and dehydrates is acceptable, otherwise, it would have been altered long before now.

Is the system perfect?  Of course not.  Could it be improved upon?  Sure.  But to say "this is unrealistic to such a degree that it starts being damaging to the experience" is silly to say the least and is why I'm saying why play it if it annoys you to this degree?

At this stage, it may get tweaked a bit, but it ain't gonna get redesigned, so like it or not, it is what it is.

[liquidsnake 275]

12 hours ago, drgullen said:

No, what I'm saying is we're almost 2 full years and 9 patches (with the 10th coming later this year) into the released version of the game.  I highly doubt Bohemia is going to suddenly change all these things you don't like about the survival aspects.  They clearly think the current setup of how a character starves and dehydrates is acceptable, otherwise, it would have been altered long before now.

Is the system perfect?  Of course not.  Could it be improved upon?  Sure.  But to say "this is unrealistic to such a degree that it starts being damaging to the experience" is silly to say the least and is why I'm saying why play it if it annoys you to this degree?

At this stage, it may get tweaked a bit, but it ain't gonna get redesigned, so like it or not, it is what it is.

I have been playing all those patches and I only noticed the extreme food situation this patch, so I don't know what you're talking about there. I never had this issue before. I suppose it is technically possible that it has always been like this and it's just the loot changes that bring attention to how fast starvation happens, but I doubt that. We've had other patches in which finding food was hard and I didn't notice this issue back then.

[rackinglad27 138]

8 hours ago, liquidsnake said:

I have been playing all those patches and I only noticed the extreme food situation this patch, so I don't know what you're talking about there. I never had this issue before. I suppose it is technically possible that it has always been like this and it's just the loot changes that bring attention to how fast starvation happens, but I doubt that. We've had other patches in which finding food was hard and I didn't notice this issue back then.

food is harder to come by now yes but I only ever die as a freshie if I don't find food and water in time, that being said I rarely die as a freshie too as I just kill zombies for the odd can of drink or food or make a stone knife and slaughter a chicken which are easily found in all the towns. I like this new loot economy because it also puts more emphasis on hunting deer and boar etc etc, so soon as you have a gun and some ammo you should listen out for the various animal sounds and home in for the kill, gather all the animal fat you can and cook it and there you are set for a good time with a belly full of the good stuff. (I wouldn't bother trying to farm because the veg you grow is sustainable enough in my opinion as it takes copius amounts to satisfy your hunger) 

[William Sternritter 449]

On 9/27/2020 at 10:43 PM, drgullen said:

No, what I'm saying is we're almost 2 full years and 9 patches (with the 10th coming later this year) into the released version of the game.  I highly doubt Bohemia is going to suddenly change all these things you don't like about the survival aspects.  They clearly think the current setup of how a character starves and dehydrates is acceptable, otherwise, it would have been altered long before now.

I have my doubts about that. Not that long ago you could live entirely off of mushrooms, as they would spawn really fast and kept you both fed and hydrated. Now the fruit and mushroom spawn is completely different and it makes collecting them quite frustrating in fact, since they rot too fast. The game mechanic has not changed, that is true, but all it takes is changing a few variables and the experience is completely different. So I think they are still tweaking it and if anything tweaking the calories and how fast you burn them should be the easiest thing to change. I still think that they are rebalancing it as they add more and more food options. Do we know if the food palette is now complete? 

[liquidsnake 275]

15 hours ago, rackinglad27 said:

food is harder to come by now yes but I only ever die as a freshie if I don't find food and water in time, that being said I rarely die as a freshie too as I just kill zombies for the odd can of drink or food or make a stone knife and slaughter a chicken which are easily found in all the towns. I like this new loot economy because it also puts more emphasis on hunting deer and boar etc etc, so soon as you have a gun and some ammo you should listen out for the various animal sounds and home in for the kill, gather all the animal fat you can and cook it and there you are set for a good time with a belly full of the good stuff. (I wouldn't bother trying to farm because the veg you grow is sustainable enough in my opinion as it takes copius amounts to satisfy your hunger) 

I love the loot economy too. Especially the longer persistence is great as you can actually see the remnants of a battle now (more often anyway). The challenge to find something is great, but the insane rate at which we starve is not. I think it would be a lot more realistic and no less challenging if starvation (as in death) happens a lot slower, but there are other limitations tied to your energised and hydration stats. For instance, make it impossible to sprint or heavily impair sprinting when at yellow energised stat, because you lack the energy to do it. Make the character start limping at red energised state (even if health is full), to show how the character is completely bereft of energy and at this point is just burning their muscle/fat for reserve energy. This makes a low energy stat a challenge not by having you die comically fast, but by seriously impairing your ability to travel while at the same time slowly picking away at your health to simulate a more realistic path to starvation that is no less challenging. This also requires planning, because if the red food state sneaks up on you, you're going to have a lot of trouble finding food while your health slowly diminishes and in the long term slows your movement even further.

[discipled 63]

On 9/26/2020 at 6:59 PM, liquidsnake said:

I got sick either by drinking from a pump well or because I was cold as a fresh spawn. Either way not much I could have done. And managing hunger/thirst, while certainly possible (which is not what I'm complaining about), is absolutely not reasonable because starvation happens about 720 times faster than it does in real life. I get that the game needs to be a challenge to have it be fun, but the correct way to get that done is to stay within certain bounds of realism. Because making things challenging for the sake of having a challenge even though it makes zero sense is not fun. Instead of making starvation comically fast, food could be more rare or a limp could set in that lasts a lot longer and hampers looting/PvP. And most importantly, healing is also way too fast.

Right now the game is no fun to me. Not because managing food is difficult; I know how to source food, but simply because the way starvation is currently implemented as something you have to constantly manage and plan for even on short treks breaks immersion in a really bad way. I like challenges, but I don't like exaggerated and unrealistic tasks that make the survival experience feel fake. It breaks immersion in a way that makes me want to stop playing. I've been playing DayZ since the mod and I can actually say that I've never had this little fun playing the game. 

You got sick probably because after killing a chicken you didn't wash the blood from your hands, that's Salmonella... When you vomit you lose a TON of Water and Calories... it's highly destructive to your character. If you were cold and wet and sick, yeah makes sense you died. Keep warm, dry and wash your hands. Drinking from a well/spiggot will not get  you sick. You got sick because of the bloody hands or from drinking from anything else NOT a well. if you drink from a found bottle of water you can get sick from that. Dump it out and fill it up from a well... OR if you boil water in a cooking pot that'll sterilize it too OR use chlorine tabs. It's not a bad game, it's lack of knowledge that killed you.