So, my take on it would be to add a spoiling mechanic where food sent to camp only lasts one long rest then spoils unless it's preserved. Food you keep on you wouldn't spoil but you'd have to carry it... Things like wine wouldn't spoil but have a higher re-sale value so you'd have to choose between keeping for supplies or selling it for cash. You'd only be able to preserve when at Camp with a successful Survival roll and any failures would make the food useless. Preserved food never spoils and has half the weight but only half the value (round up) of fresh food.
I would also add in a mechanic where if you spend a small amount of food while taking a short rest you get a bonus to HP recovery or something like that. This way you are encouraged to keep some food with you rather than send everything back to camp.
For most of the game food shouldn't be a big issue but they've teased a long journey at the end of EA and there's also the possibility of traveling to other realms so that could be an interesting opportunity to use food to add an extra level of difficulty to the adventure so I'm not advocating removing the mechanic enterally. However, for some this would be just an annoyance so I would also add in an option to remove food enterally for people who just don't want to bother.
Anyway I'm curious what people thing and what other option short of removing food sound reasonable.
I would be fine with food spoiling. I don't think there should be a spoilage rate difference between food we carry or food left at camp, if someone has Survival (or frost spells?) they would be able to preserve food a bit longer no matter where it was. They could add in recipes as well for preservation, like smoked meat and dried fruit for example. Perhaps just a button to assign someone to it while at camp, there don't need to be extra animations for it or anything. Something similar to the Pathfinder games where you select a party member and select a recipe and it happens over a long rest.
Would like there to be a special food storage chest as well, perhaps this would contain only the preserved food. This could be something the game auto removes food from for a long rest, but if we wanted to use fresh food then this would need to be in our inventory first. I think the stupid send to camp function should not work on this storage chest because it would only hold what we preserved, but this food would be auto added to the chest.
And obviously there would need to be an option for people to turn off the spoiling mechanic.
