Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Food should spoil otherwise why have so much?

Or simply mark it all as Wares and sell to nearby vendor with single click ... all at once ... fast ... effectively ... calm ...

Sure, but to mark as Wares you have to select item, select Mark as Wares. Click item. Mark as Wares. One painstaking item at a time.

Shift-Click will do it

Please God no. While realistic, it always turns out to be more annoying than anything.

lol. The point is that the item management system is not good presently. So, here's how I see this playing out:

I go about picking up hundreds of food items. Now I have to go through all my food items and figure out which ones have spoiled and which are still good - REGULARLY. I hover over a food item to see if it's spoiled, and if it is, Shift-Click. Hover over another, check if spoiled, Shift-Click.

Then, at some point, I need to go to the merchant to sell them?... or do I just dump them because a merchant isn't going to want to buy spoiled food. Right? Can you just dump all Wares?

And what if I want to sell some Wares but dump others?

Like I said, I like the concept, but with Item Management being as bad as it is currently, no thank you.

Now, if they fix Item Management, and/or they make it so that any spoiled food is just auto-dumped because it's worthless, then sure. I think that'd be a very good immersive thing to do, and it would greatly help to limit long resting via limiting your food supplies. Suddenly, all those pies and pig's heads and racks of ribs, fish and such would be good for one long rest and then spoiled. Garbage. Gone. Apples, veggies, etc. might be good for a week's worth of LRs, but the heftier items wouldn't.

But if they don't fix Item Management, please no. I already hate Item Management a lot in this game.

Or ... maybe you just dont.
Bcs you either know from EA, or learn very fast that food spoils in your inventory so you try really hard to pick only so much you need for rest, but leave other where it is, so you dont need to get through that ugly tedious item management you despite so much? O_o

Just a thought.

That would be a good idea. It is doubtful that we would need fertilizer for anything, so spoiled food should disappear from our inventory.

this. I already find the camp supplies annoying right now. I guess if there was an option to enable/disable camp supplies then I wouldnt mind.

You might argue why the food mini-game is required in the first place.

It seems like a mechanic to limit the amount of Long Resting in the game, but it completely fails to accomplish anything of the sort. It's just extra item management and extra clicks before resting.

What if food was so sparse that it actually would somehow influence your choice to Long Rest? So that you actually would have to look for it, manage it, and go back to Druid Grove to buy more before resting if you run out. How much fun would that be? They can't lock the player out of the game and stop us from resting even if we are being too careless with food. Starving under normal circumstances would be ridiculous. So how could such a food mechanic ever function as a Long Rest limiter? If it can't limit resting, why do we have to go through the hoops?

This is why previous D&D video games haven't had such a food mechanic and use other means to limit resting, such as random encounters, no rest zones or hard supply limits and gold tax. Pathfinder did the best job turning the camping into the real event it deserves to be, in actual locations rather than the fake nowhere safehouses we have in BG3.

It's great Larian are trying new things but in this case it seems like the wheel does not need reinventing.

Food getting spoiled would only add an extra level of complexity, more hoops, on a system that fundamentally doesn't work.

I gues ... none? O_o

I mean logically ...

You are complaining that food managed to limit nothing ... bcs there is so much of it ... so it effectivelly "just adds extra clicks".

So if there would be as you said need to "go back to Druid Grove to buy more before resting" ... you would still not limit anything, just adding yet another extra clics in order to rest. O_o
And add yet another anoyance by forcing players to run back and forth between any food vendor and their curent location.

And what about those who kill the grove?

If food auto-vanishes if spoiled, I'm all for spoiling food - provided Larian warns us. The last thing we want is a crate full of food that suddenly goes bad. We need to rest, but there's no food.

I REALLY don't want more item management. By the end of EA, I start to not even care about picking up items because it just means more work managing it all for little reward. I can't even imagine if I had to sift through a bunch of food and drop all the spoiled stuff.

Is this pure trolling now? You literally repeated my point and presented it as an argument against itself.

Could you... state how you would like the food/rest system to be, with reasoning? That would be more useful for discussion than just trying to refute everything other people say.

I know, i was there when i writed it.

I would not call it trolling ...
I find it funny, thats true ... but its still perfectly valid point in my honest opinion.
I only used your own words to make sure you will get what i try to tell you, bcs that was exactly what i see there.

Sure!

I believe curent state is fulfilling its purpose, it makes Long Rest spaming incovient, bcs it is anoying to either keep draging food out of the camp crate, or wasting half of your character inventory for it ... no it dont makes it impossible to Long Rest any time you want, and i believe that is good thing ... it only makes me not wanting to Long Rest unless i need to, and that is perfectly fine restriction for my taste.
As i stated countless times im all in for options ... so if you want to rest after every fight, talk, or step > you can ... if you dont > you dont need to ... perfect ballance.

As for food, i would certainly not mind if most of it we find on the road would be either rotten or processed (prefferably rotten, especialy on places where nobody was for a loooooooooong time) ... i mean logicaly, person who goes for long journey will most likely take with him dryed or salted meat, rather than fresh one.
I would certainly not mind at all, if the amount of food we find "on the road" (meaning outside any kind of civilisation) would be fairly reduced.

I certainly do like the idea that fresh food should provide more nutrition (read as camp supplies value) than processed ... but it also should spoil during the specific amount of rests ... we should also get option to process our food automaticly during Long Rest ... aka one button for "Long Rest" ... and another button for "Long Rest and process your food" ...

Rotten food should be concidered junk item, and i would certainly dont mind at all, if it would mark itself automaticly as Wares ... but i dont want to make it dissapear ... in ideal world, i would like it to be throwable object that would piss people off, lower their liking of our character, but dont take any HP, so it would not start combat (so i would have at least SOMETHING for my revenge against those damn imortal Tiefling kids) ... but i believe automatic marking as wares, maybe turning into "bag of rotten food" and stacking no matter what kind of food it was originaly, would be perfectly fine.

As the last point i believe we should have option to pack 40 units of processed food into Bag od Camp Supplies ... in order to minimalize amount of item management needed.

And just a tiny little offtopic ... most of all, i belive that part of Difficiulty settings should be option to set amount of food your characters need per Long Rest ... prefferably with range between 0-200 ...
0 for people who just want to Long Rest any time they want and dont wish to bother with food at all, bcs they are able to restrict themselves so their resting dont spoil their fun ... namely Icelyn.
and 200 for people who want is as hardcore as possible ... i dont have any name here.

And since i allready started with offtopics, but still related to food ...
I also liked the idea from GM4Him that we should get infinite Short Rests, but they would take small portion (wich should also be adjustable by difficiulty settings) of our Long Rest supplies ...

I also believe that food should not be buyable from Druids, bcs their own argument is that they cannot afford to feed the refugees ... on the contrary, they (both Tieflings and Druids) should offer better price for food than any other vendor.

I also believe that 1 Goodberry should provide 1/4 of your Long Rest amount of nutrition, no matter how high you set it ... since that is litteraly its roleplay purpose.
So yes, 4 Goodberries would mean free Long Rest.

Well ... that would be mine ideal case.
Hope you like it. Will edit if i remember something more.

Good job Larian ! An annoying mechanic to limit the use of another one !
What an improvement compared to the camp supply limitation in POE ! We're loosing even less time because the chest is just right next to us !

Just get rid of FOOD already. A boat load of annoyance solved. Add more interesting potions.
BG1 and BG2 did not have food from what I remember? Does Solasta have food?

Solasta have food, yes

Baldur's Gate did not have food. There were quite a few old CRPGs where logistics felt like part of the game (i.e. make sure you have all kind of supplies including food), including Ultima and the Magic Candle games. Worked well enough there, until you started to have to manually feed your companions in Ultima 7, which then again was solved by the F hotkey in Serpent Isle.

But food as a mechanic would need to be more central, it is probably best to just get rid off it here. Or have a cooking subsystem like Pillars or Pathfinder, where you use it for a long-lasting bonus.

I don't recall any prominent D&D games at all where food was a hard limitation, but that is probably since every editions had a create food/create water spell available at fairly low levels.

I played Subnautica recently and food there does spoil. While the game mechanic fits into a survival game, I found it just tedious. I don't want to micro manage hunger and food in an RPG.

Finding rotten food in containers is fine, though.

I remember my first playthrough. First time I found food I said to myself that I had better conserve and stock up on all the food I find. This must be a survival game. That's okay because that makes sense from a story perspective. You just crashed in the middle of nowhere. You have no idea when you're going to find food again.

But then I discovered it was just for healing and that it was better than potions and spells. I can eat a whole lamb during combat. That was just goofy.

After they changed it to be a requirement for resting, I thought that it was a good change and it made much more sense. Like when I first started playing I started to conserve because I thought that once again food was going to to be scarce since it was now going to be a limit for long rest. They even said that the cost was supposed to increase based on your level, but that didn't happen.

So, after the change, at first I was really into it. I got to pick what dinner we were going to have for that evening and I was prepared to have to conserve to make sure I had enough for the long term.

But there was no real limiting factor at all. As mentioned many many times, food is so abundant that it limits nothing. The ability to pick what I'm having for dinner got old real fast and the entire system is now just pointless item management like so many other things in the game presently.

Again, I wouldn't mind a spoiling mechanic as long as it actually decreases how much item management I have to do instead of being a tedious item management mechanic where I have to sort through all my food everyday to see what spoiled and what has it and then toss the spoiled stuff. If you're going to use food in some way to limit rest and make it even remotely meaningful, the entire system needs to be streamlined much more effectively.

You know... Like:

1. Food cost for short rest as well as long but much cheaper for short. After all, according to D&D 5e, you're supposed to eat and drink when short resting too. The point? Consumes camping supplies faster. Makes food more important to carry in the party, and not just leave it at camp. Adds value to short rest. It's much cheaper.
2. Perishable food spoils but when it does you get a message in the morning saying x number of camping supplies spoiled and were tossed. So, again, auto-vanishes so I don't have to manually do it. Again, makes food more important and makes you rest less for fear of using too much. Maybe you'll even need to buy food from a vendor.

Either that or just get rid of it all together and don't have food. The main thing I really don't want is more pointless item management. I guess my main point here is that either make food much more valuable and meaningful or get rid of it.

Yeah. No. The more I think about food spoiling, the more I think it is contrary to Larian's plan to make food limit long rest.

If I have 300 camp supplies between the beach and the grove, and I know that 150 of that will spoil in 2 day, 75 will spoil in 4 days and 75 in 6 days, even if short rest cost camping supplies, I'd just use the heck out of the food. In other words, instead of discouraging me from long rest, I'd use it more because I'd think, "Well, don't want to waste all that food I found. Best rest a lot cause it's just gonna go bad anyway.". Defeats the purpose.

If Larian is going to continue with food limiting Long Rest, and they aren't going to use Hit Dice to govern Short, I then think the best solution is to make Short Rest cost camping supplies and increase the long rest cost.

Short Rest = 5 camp supplies per character in party. So about 20-30 (if they eventually allow party of 6). Then lift the 2 Short rest limit. With camp supplies costing 20-30 a pop, out of 300, that's like 10ish short rests by the time you reach the Grove if you don't long rest once. If you can just use short rest and make it, yay you.

Long Rest = 10 per character at camp. So 60 with MC and origins or 90 with party of 4 and origins. That means if you don't short rest, you could get 3-5 long rests in between the beach and the grove.

What's that really look like? Most people would probably Short Rest 2-4 times between the beach and the grove for maybe 80 camping supplies and long rest 1-2 times for roughly 120, leaving about 100 camping supplies by the time they get to the grove and could buy more if needed.

This creates some limit while allowing players to play the way they like without too much restraint. Want to short rest more because you're a Warlock? You can do so more than 2 times a day. Your class is better with this system and really benefits from using short rest more. Playing a wizard and want to long rest more? 205 long rests by the time you reach the Grove should be more than enough.