Update Details (19th June 2018) - Cooking, Farming, New Health System, Mining Drill and more!

Hi all! This new update aims to expand on the later-game subsistence mechanics, bringing greater depth to player self sufficiency, while adding a progression mechanic to the overall health system.


There are now 3 new types of collectable plants that spawn in the world; wild carrots, potatoes and onions.

While these plants can be found from day one, they are fairly rare and not meant as a reliable source of early-game veggies (although they are a fair supplement). In fact much of the time they will only yield a seed for the given plant type, requiring the player to plant and grow their own crops.

The new seeds can all be used in the plantbed to grow an abundance of vegetables in your base.

Each seed will yield 3 veggies of its type, and each vegetable can be used to yield a single seed. Meaning, technically, players only need a single seed to mass-produce vegetables of its type.

I slightly decreased the amount of water and fertilizer each plant uses while growing in the plantbed. However be aware that overloading plantbeds puts heavier demands on water and fertilizer, so try to only grow what you can afford.


Players can now craft an oven in the BCU. This is a powered device that provides an assortment of new food recipes for players to cook.

The oven is designed as a later-game item, and requires the workbench as well as expanded power/mass storage capability to craft.



In order to use the oven. Several types of pans are required, which can be crafted at the workbench.

Each pan unlocks its own tier of recipes. There are 3 tiers: Fried, Boiled and Baked. Some recipes even require pre-cooked ingredients from other tiers. The pans increase in cost across the 3 tiers.

The oven requires power to use. It can queue recipes (much like crafting in the workbench or BCU) and deducts the power required for each recipe when the player queues the item. Queued recipes can be cancelled, which refunds the ingredients and power.

The oven will visibly show heated hobs, steaming pans, etc to indicate which recipe types are cooking at any given time.



The oven can be upgraded to increase its power efficiency. There are two separate upgrades, each reducing the power cost of each recipe by 15%.



There are a total of 10 new cooked food items. Many of which required reared animal produce and home grown vegetables.


Makes use of the new vegetables while pairing with the base-grade meats and chicken eggs.



All of the boiled recipes require a canteen of clean water. I’ve added a mechanic to empty only the contents, leaving the empty canteen in the player’s inventory. If the player cancels the recipe, the clean water will be administered back into the empty canteen (if the player is still holding it).



Considered the more elaborate cooked recipe items, which offer the greatest benefits to the new health system (explained below). These recipes take the longest to cook, and the required baking pan is the most expensive of the three pans.



Once a chicken levels up to level 10, they will now yield a whole raw chicken when butchered, which can be roasted in the oven (currently the highest tier cooked meal).



All of the new cookable recipes are in place to support an overhauled player health system.

Players start with a specific max health and max strength (which differs across difficulty modes). These values can be viewed in the updated health hud:

Under both the health and strength meters, you will notice a small sub-meter indicating the progress of boosting another level to the max value.

Different cooked food items will boost these meters. Some basic cooked items will offer very little boost, while other more elaborate cooked meals will add substantial boosts.

Each time you fill the sub-meter of health or strength, it will boost the max value. There is currently a max cap of 125.

The intention behind this system is to put greater emphasis on raising animals, farming crops and producing higher quality foods. Also a sense of your character slowly growing stronger and more agile if you are living well.

It makes sense that there should greater reward to eating a hot homemade tomato soup, over eating 10 raw kelp straight out of the lakes.

Finding the correct balance to this new system will take time, so I strongly welcome opinions and suggestions once you’ve had a chance to try it out. It is intended as a subtle progression system to tie-in with later-game progression, not a race to hit max levels.


Dying will deduct progress on max health and strength (easy/normal == -5, hardcore == -10). Untreated/prolonged illness or cold exposure will also have a gradual negative impact on these levels.


Many of the cooked meals can only be eaten if the player is hungry enough. The player’s hunger bar needs to accommodate ⅓ of the total provided by the meal. I thought it was necessary to put some restraints on the new system to avoid it being spammed. Lets see how it plays out.


I needed to update the old item hover tips to better display the new stats. They now show larger/higher-detail item images, and layout the stats in a cleaner format. They are also responsive to screen location (so they won’t display partially off-screen, like previously with the clothing hud slots).

Food items that offer a health/strength boost will display these stats in green (see image above).


The Wellhead was added as a means of acquiring water prior to lakes/rivers being added to the game - which some of you may remember. It soon became redundant when the first Lakes update dropped, which was a shame as it was a cool device and I put in a lot of care when implementing it.

I decided to repurpose it into the Mining Drill. While mostly operating the same, players can now select a specific ore-type to target and slowly mine that one ore-type.This should be handy for when players are running low on a specific ore-type.

• Eating low-grade raw chicken and rabbit now causes illness.
  
• Antidotes now require raw liver (not cooked/burnt/rotten).
  
• Fixed bug that could cause hunters and animals to spawn outside the fence (at the 90° fence corner by the new expansion).
  
• Jumping and landing in shallow river water now triggers appropriate splashing sound.
  
• Players can now mouse-hover + use-key on the canteen to fill it with water.
  
• Fixed splashing footsteps not playing at the lower section of the new wide stream.
  
• Increase max stack counts of many items (too many to list), to accommodate for growing number of item types.
  
• Fixed rare bug that would cause clients of network games to not lose stamina and health stats.
  

I think I’ve detailed all the key points of the new changes. I’ve touched many of the core systems, so I fully expect to make required balancing tweaks moving forward.

I welcome all feedback on the update. If you haven’t yet, please join myself and other players on the official Discord (invite below). You can also follow the game on Twitter and Facebook.

Thanks to all the community for the support, it means a lot. Hope everyone has an awesome week!
CG

Discord invite: https://discord.gg/zyy4jQs