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

I see what you mean, but time only advances upon LR. If resting is what spoils the food, wouldn’t a prudent player make their days longer in order to get the most out of their supplies?

I suppose it depends on when the timer starts. If food spoils two days after your find it, I agree that you might as well rest as soon as you find enough food. If food starts spoiling when you arrive in an area, then you’re incentivized to stretch your days to keep unfound food fresh.

I like your suggestion to charge food for SR as well as the increase in LR cost based on camp dwellers. Do you include Volo and Halsin in that? If so, would that change the cost while resting in minicamps?

Remove food all together, make resting cause partial respawns/ incounters that attack your camp, resting is only safe in inns and other havens.

Crude, but I would much rather have this than what we have now.

Resting too frequently could gradually increase the chances of being attacked. So if you try to play smart and rest as little as possible, the game should reward that. If you spam rest after every fight, you should have a much higher chance of being attacked. The game would teach the player the world is reactive and dangerous and rest spam would be discouraged quite naturally.

The player would simply sell all unnecessary food in exchange for camp supplies.
In the worst case, you would end up only needing to return to the trader.

Timer would have to start once you found food, since the entire EA map is one big area. So, I would think programming all food throughout the whole map to start spoiling as soon as you land on the beach, all food everywhere would start to go bad. So, spoiling food would only promote long rest. Best not find more food today, or it might spoil.

As for respawns, many have expressed that they hate that idea, and frankly, if you think about it in practice, yeah. I agree. Imagine. You fight the spiders in the whispering depths. But you just can't face her yet. Matriarch, you can just tell, is too tough. So you rest and return. Ugh. Respawned enemies. By the time you get to the matriarch, too weak again. Long rest. Respawned spiders again. It could cause you to basically get stuck in a vicious loop.

Getting attacked while resting sucks. If the enemies are too weak, it's annoying and lame. If too strong, characters die and you reload until you successfully rest. It's just not a good discouragement. It's more annoying than anything.

The idea of LR camp supply cost based on number in camp is that as your camp grows the cost increases. It makes sense from a realistic perspective. Only party members count. Halsin and Volo don't quest, so they can fend for themselves.

+1 to whole. Great points.

So, the idea of SR costing camp supplies gives meaning and purpose even to food versus camp supplies packs. If a SR costs 5 per character in party, and a supply pack is 40 camp supplies, an SR would waste a supply pack. But food you are carrying could be used instead so you save the camp supply pack for long rest.

It would look like this (just an example, not the exact way it would HAVE to play out):

Land on beach. Find fish and such. Fight intellect devourers. Need short rest. Just you and SH. 10 camp supplies. You should have that much from beach. Keep going. Meet Astarion. Fight fishermen. Head to crypt. Meet Gale. Fight gimblebock but find more food. Enough to SR again. This time it costs 20 because party of 4. Fight mercs inside. Find LOTS of food. Now have enough to long rest. 40 to LR because only 4 at camp. As an alternative, you could SR again for 20 and keep going. Either way, you have so much food after this because the mercs have like over 100 camping supplies in the dining room.

I'd already prefer to use a long rest. The only thing you will achieve with this change is that short rest will be even less useful than it already is. Playing with food is completely pointless. Ultimately, you will have it anyway, so that you can rest whenever you want, because the game will never let you block, and the only thing that will change is that it will only be more irritating.

The design of the map should make spliting it up into smaller areas easy because it is made of distinctive zones gated by choke points. The hag’s swamp, for example, already functions as an unit distinct from the rest of the map.
There are already events that trigger upon crossing certain thresholds: cutscenes, autosaves… It’s not inconceivable that entering into the Druid Grove or the Blighted Village for the first time could trigger a spoiling timer for all of the food therein.

My initial thought was that camp supplies should also spoil. But you’re right that players could extend the shelf life of their supplies by trading almost rotten food for fresh food with vendors. Players would have to pay a commission every time, but since money is no object in BG3… I don’t have a good answer there.

I suppose you're right. They could trigger the spoiling of food as soon as you enter a specific area, but that still encourages more long rests, defeating the purpose.

I enter Blighted Village and know all food I find there will go bad soon. So I know I'll want to long rest after Blighted Village to use as much food as possible before moving on.

So, it kind of forces you into doing each area you trigger. What I mean is, once I trigger Blighted Village, the food starts to spoil. But what if I skirt around and head to the bog? Now food from 2 areas are triggered as spoiling. That could mess me up for later. Best to just focus on 1 area at a time then if food spoils.

Food is a dead end, you just can't do it right to get the effect you want.

I'm not 100% disagreeing with you. It's really just extra item management that doesn't really limit resting which is what Larian said they were using it for.

I'm just trying to kinda sorta make it work as best I can because, you know, Larian's trying to make it work.

I'm not sure why they throw away the idea of restraining players from resting in the first place? It seemed kinda logical, for example, resting in the Underdark is funny assuming its reputation of being a deadly dangerous place

BTW. I just wanted to say I did notice your response and thank you. It was nice to agree on something.

I think there needs to be a clarification. No one wants Limited Resting. This means hard core you can only rest X number of times. If you need more, sucks to be you. Reload. You're out of Long Rests. A true limit would be what they've done to Short Rest. 2 per day is all you get.

What many are asking for is a Long Rest mechanic that discourages resting too often. Allowing Long Rest without any consequences makes Short Rest practically pointless. It is currently literally only a Quality of Life Rest button so you don't have to go to camp and have dialogues, but you still get some healing.
Likewise, no penalty for spamming Short Rest makes Long Rest less important. Some we just want both me mechanics to have value.

Basically, why should I Long Rest instead of Short? Why should I Short Rest instead of Long? Give me valid reasons for both; strategic reasons why I need to do both. As it stands, there is no real strategic value to Short Rest because you can Long Rest whenever without any reason to not Long Rest. In fact, Long Rest is promoted in various ways.

Food cost, however, does actually add some value to Short Rest. It doesn't cost food. But, if food is in such abundance, it still adds no value then to Short Rest. So, the true issue we actually have right now is that food could work to dissuade Long Rest spamming and this make Short Rest more important if food wasn't so abundant. But then, if you don't supply enough food, you could soft lock players.

Food could still work, but it needs to be given a lot more strategy so players can weigh their choices and the choices are meaningful.

I'll let you know another idea I had later. Gotta run.

You don't see one problem?
If there is no rest limit, food is unlimited. This means that you can do anything and it won't solve any problem. The only way to limit rest is to introduce a hard limit or some CD. The latter will not work completely on BG3.
Another way to reduce it is to make it so annoying that the player won't want to use it (PoE1 and Pathfinder tactics).

No. See. You're getting hung up on "limit".

What nobody wants:

Example. You crash on the beach. You find 35 food. 40 is required for long rest. The intellect devourers nearly kill you. You need to long rest. Too bad. You didn't earn enough to and the devs designed it this way because they thought people should never be able to long rest at this point. GG player. Best reload until you get it right.

This is a hard limit. Might as well say "you get 0 LRs at the beginning and must earn LRs by completing x number of story markers.". No thanks. I don't even want this for short rest. I want them to remove the 2/day hard SR limit.

What many are asking for:

A meaningful resting system that has strategic value for both long and short rest giving both more value from a mechanics perspective. We don't want the value to be just quality of life and/or that we must use them if we want character development and interaction AND we are discouraged from using them frequently in order to enjoy the rest of the game.

In other words, we don't want the game to be designed in such a way that we feel like we are supposed to Long rest frequently in order to even defeat enemies we are about to run into.

For example, in wrath of the righteous, once I got to the surface and started at the inn, I gathered my party and went out into the city to adventure. I was involved in a random encounter, got to the marketplace, went through the entire marketplace map, used a lot of potions and spells to keep going because resting in that area was extremely dangerous, defeated the entire area, left the marketplace and went to a tower, defeated the tower and all the demons within, still didn't rest once, and finally return to the inn to rest because at that point I was pretty bad off. It was a long adventuring experience in between rests, and I didn't feel like I had to rest until after doing a lot of stuff.

It wasn't that I couldn't rest during that entire time, but from a gaming perspective I was encouraged to keep going on my adventure and discouraged from resting. Again, it wasn't that I couldn't rest, but I didn't feel like I needed to and I didn't feel like I should. I was fighting enemies that were hurting my characters, but they weren't so overpowered that they were making me feel like I had to expend all my spells and take a rest afterwards in between each fight.

And finally, and perhaps one of the most important things to me, I don't feel like in that game that I will miss out on any dialogs or character development because I continued my adventuring day and went too far. At any point in time, I could return to the inn and have conversations with any of the characters I have met, not missing a single conversation with each one simply because I didn't rest enough.

This brings it back to spoiling food. The problem with it is that no matter how you implement it, the mechanic would promote long rest more frequently and discourage continuing the adventuring day. This is the opposite of what many of us are looking for.

If food starts spoiling as soon as you enter an area, you are then encouraged to only go through each individual area, one area at a time, and then rest after that specific area. Why? Because you wouldn't want to enter another area and thus trigger the spoiling of food that you may really need later. So, you are encouraged to rest a lot more than you would if you knew that food didn't spoil.

Or, if food starts to spoil as soon as you find it, then you are encouraged to long rest as soon as you find just enough food to long rest. After all, why waste food? If you find more than you need to long rest, it'll just spoil.

Regardless, spoiling food is in no way a meaningful and strategic resting mechanic feature. It would only defeat the entire point of managing food to limit resting. It would only encourage long rest more and discourage continuing each day as long as you can possibly stretch your party within reason.

Completely agree with your this and previous statements. Spoiling food will encourage you to rest because you wouldn't want to waste it. So if you find a supply pack, you'll want to rest as soon as you can to prevent it from spoiling, because it gives you a full free rest.
Long resting should be meaningful. Also I agree about short resting. Rather than putting a 2 per day rule, Larian should come up with why i should and shouldn't short rest. Something along the lines "you will restore your spellslots, heal a little, BUT at this cost" without quantity restrictions

This topic is so confusing. Can someone explain it without a wall of text? In a simple way?

1. A long rest should always be available so the player isn't soft locked out of the game, and

2. A long rest should not always be available because players will spam it.

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I don't want to invalidate someone else's experience, but the combats aren't so hard that the player can't go without resting. If someone is finding them that difficult, maybe another approach would help? I'm not talking about using barrels or anything. Those exploits aren't necessary.

Again, it's hard for me to understand the constant need to rest in the game. Personally, I rarely feel like I need to long rest before I get to the grove, unless I'm doing it for some RP reason, like I want to store some heavier items but I feel bad about doing it before even setting up a camp.

I'm not bragging about being good at the game. I just literally don't understand why someone else is finding it so difficult, and that makes me want to explore the play style being exercised.

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I get that the cut scenes being tied to resting encourage the player to take long rests. I don't have a problem with that, though. Most of the scenes are just there for flavor. It doesn't ruin the game if you miss Gale reflecting by the ballet of flames.

No matter how thorough your playthrough, you're inevitably going to miss something. A scene, a treasure chest, a dialogue tree, whatever. It happens.

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That said, if there are a ton of players spamming the long rest to get every cut scene--and if that's a problem for some reason I can't imagine--then the only reasonable solution I can think of would be world reactivity.

It's like in Grymforge. If you long rest twice after mentally talking to Nere, then Nere dies from the poison.

The same thing could happen with other content.