RE: Wilderness Travel on Empty Stomach

[Squeak]

(Wilderness) Traveling the wilderness on an empty stomach now causes a penalty to morale and incurs extra travel time.

Could we have this penalty lessened a little bit?

• (energy -12)
  Traveling on an empty stomach takes its toll ...
  {Morale -1.00}
  Traveltime: 8 seconds.

I was sitting at 2% nutrition and full energy, but when I moved, it dropped me to 0% nutrition and incurred this penalty. I'm aware that 2% nutrition means you're absolutely famished, but taking an immediate -1 to morale is pretty hefty, especially when the only "tasty" thing I can think of to eat only provides a + .40 to morale. Perhaps a couple movements after one reaches 0% incurs the additional round time and messaging, followed by increasing morale hits? A little grace period, as it were, before you really start taking hits to morale which is already pretty limited in ways to increase.

[Gorth]

Easy agree, here. Morale is a game changer right now, with not having rerolls from a lot of things. Penalizing it more is just painful.

[Lysse]

Morale is pretty trivially easy to maintain unless you refuse to use bath houses/soaps and inn rooms. I feel like you have a whole bunch of grace period before the morale penalties hit - there's a whole gauge that ticks down letting you know you're approaching the danger zone.

As long as the penalty doesn't kick in multiple times (they usually don't - if it does, I'd say lessening the penalty to something like 0.5 or 0.75 would be fine), this only seems like it's going to be an issue if you're trying to minmax your nutrition/energy.

[Gorth]

Soap and innrooms are great, except if you have been out grinding for a while, or wandering. Dunno. It just feels like another kick in the teeth with all of the struggle that is grinding, at the moment.

[Lysse]

Soap and innrooms are great, except if you have been out grinding for a while, or wandering. Dunno. It just feels like another kick in the teeth with all of the struggle that is grinding, at the moment.

How far down are you letting your morale get on your characters, that logging out for a few hours, eating morale food, and taking a bath with soap aren't bringing you up either to full or close to full?

As someone who plays a character that suffers more than the average character from the harshness of the wilderness and the grind, with no access to morale food, soap, or bath houses and exactly one amenity that grants positive morale, seldom do I ever drop below 2 or 3 morale. So I'm genuinely confused as to how people are letting theirs tank so low that it can't be addressed (even without the 250 riln bed) with just washing at the bath house once or twice a day.

[Rias]

Is there some meta reason I'm not aware of that makes it ideal to wait until beyond 0% nutrition before addressing it? I'm not sure I understand why 0 wouldn't be the point at which the penalty happens. You fall unconscious at 0 energy, you die at 0 vital hit location hitpoints, your gear breaks at 0 durability, your inn room expires at 0 paid days left ... why wait until "below 0" for a starvation morale penalty specifically?

In the end, the point of the mechanic is to prevent people from ignoring starvation while traveling. (In older CLOK it resulted in death by starvation, so we've already taken a step back from that!) Have you disabled the AutoEat option that automatically eats food while traveling if available? Turning that on is an easy way to ensure you don't suffer the travel starvation penalty as long as you've got food with you. And if you don't have food with you, it's probably a good idea to stop and figure something out before you get all the way down to 0%.

[artus]

I wonder if something like eating raw pine nuts is going to stack up on morale loss. If it's so then it can be quite painful if you accidentally lose your way in the wilderness or whatever. I'm glad huntables are back so at least people can set up fire for something that doesn't get your morale too low, though ouch ouch vegetarions.
1.00 morale might be a bit overkill for the current limitation of restoration methods though. anything that restores morale instantly takes money. Yes. It does generate back over time but it's really something when you don't have stuff at all outside, worse when you're a newb.

[Sneaky]

I'd like to direct you to this wiki article that was recently added.
https://clok.contrarium.net/wiki/index. ... Philosophy
In particular:
"Not to say that the people in the Lost Lands can never have any occasion to be happy or have some nice things, but overall the setting is meant to be one that highlights grim determination and rugged survival in a world that is unlikely to ever get better."
I'm sorry, but my morale on long road trips tanks hard when I'm hungry. That's in a car with AC. 1 point hit to morale is more than reasonable, especially if you're letting it hit 0. As someone who has maintained a starving character while traveling, this change wasn't a surprise either. It was mentioned many times before, and there was no input about it then. I never argued against it because it makes very real sense. I honestly thought it was going to be harsher and hit any tine you reached below 50 nutrition.

[Sneaky]

Is there some meta reason I'm not aware of that makes it ideal to wait until beyond 0% nutrition before addressing it? I'm not sure I understand why 0 wouldn't be the point at which the penalty happens. You fall unconscious at 0 energy, you die at 0 vital hit location hitpoints, your gear breaks at 0 durability, your inn room expires at 0 paid days left ... why wait until "below 0" for a starvation morale penalty specifically?

In the end, the point of the mechanic is to prevent people from ignoring starvation while traveling. (In older CLOK it resulted in death by starvation, so we've already taken a step back from that!) Have you disabled the AutoEat option that automatically eats food while traveling if available? Turning that on is an easy way to ensure you don't suffer the travel starvation penalty as long as you've got food with you. And if you don't have food with you, it's probably a good idea to stop and figure something out before you get all the way down to 0%.

The only meta reason I can think of is to save riln on food items, but you can forage a ton of food anyway. That's not really an issue unless you had to crunch down riln expenditures. Corvus has it worse since we don't have town tasks to fund small purchases like that. With the addition of wilderness hunting like Artus mentioned, it can be easier to just pack a campfire bundle if you really wanted.

[Squeak]

Admittedly, I had forgotten about the AutoEat option. I had turned it off, even back in Cogg, because 1 meat = 100% and it satisfied my need for even numbers with no waste.

I suppose it just surprised me, is all, that the second one reaches 0% nutrition, the penalty hits even with full energy. And yes, morale can be easy to monitor, but it's also the only thing that ticks downward at a rate of .3 an hour. 2.4 between times one can bathe, assuming that's every 8 hours and not everyone can/wants to use inn rooms. Again, I'll admit that I don't recall how often one can eat a tasty treat for the morale bonus, so that could just as easily offset things.

[artus]

Erm, people, we don't have threads to bind campfire bundles yet and we don't have cords to bind anything with, so no campfire bundle. We can, however, hope that trees are a bit more abundunt so we can make fire out of the branches. It would have been better if this change rolled out after we get trees back, or as soon as we get something that can offset the difficulty though. By then, it'll be much easier.

[Squeak]

You can still forage deadwood just about anywhere there are trees. You just need an axe to chop up the branches to get the materials needed for campfire teepees.

[Zeldryn]

Just chiming in to thank everybody for continuing to express their thoughts, put forward suggestions and concerns, and seek specification when they feel it's needed.

Communication's important people. We have good communication here. Keep it up.

[artus]

Oh, I just got clarification that wooded areas do spawn deadwood everywhere. That makes the problem much, much less of a problem.

I haven't suffered from anything yet, but hope morale penalty doesn't just brutally go down every single step...though it probably won't matter anyway because first, you can't regen energy so less ideal for training; second, you can't walk anywhere far aside from getting some place to regen both energy and morale and third, you can't reliably stand any chance against anything, so even without morale it still forces you to get back to whatever settlement nearby for stuff.

[Sneaky]

My mistake about the bundles, I was thinking it was possible to make them using fishing line. It's no longer the case. Maybe it was never that way? IDK At any rate a small amount of preparedness and awareness is the solution here.

[Rias]

1.00 morale might be a bit overkill for the current limitation of restoration methods though. [ ... ] hope morale penalty doesn't just brutally go down every single step...

It does go down with every wilderness movement (to the normal max morale penalty of -5). It's significantly impactful because it's not a situation that's supposed to be balanced and countered with good-morale activities, but rather it's a situation that's supposed to be avoided entirely. Turn on that AutoEat option, and if you see your nutrition level is below 50% and you're not auto-eating (hence out of food, or maybe you closed your food container) then it's time to come up with a plan now instead of waiting until you're not only out of food but also literally starving at 0% nutrition.

There's already the "(Couldn't find any food to eat.)" message if you travel with the AutoEat option on and you're below 60%, but I've added some other hunger-related messages at 40%, 25%, 10%, and 5% (regardless of the AutoEat option) to help people stay aware of their hunger status while traveling in the wilderness. They all start with "You're getting hungrier as you travel." which should make it easy to set up triggers for sounds and whatnot. Hope that helps!

[Squeak]

D'oh. I just tested the negative morale per step. Should have just waited!

Appreciate the additional messages.

[artus]

Oh great. Time to resurrect those old clok hunger sounds we used to have. Thank you, Rias.

[Rias]

One more update: At 5% nutrition it stops both queued movements and road auto-travel, so people don't get hit with the morale penalty because they didn't manage to type "stop" fast enough.

[Gorth]

Hit -5.00 morale with this, because I was looking for something and misread the amount of food I had (my fault). Could we make it not spam you with morale penalty messages every move, once you hit -5.00?