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

I lurk a lot. 😋 I do find value in forum discussions, even if heated at times, because underneath there are good points here and there that wouldn't necessarily come to light if just presented blindly without bouncing at a wall of different opinions.


Thank you!

I agree with this.

Thank you for your answer. It a rare thing for community in current gaming industry to have such close contact with the studio. I very much appreciate that

If the monster manual said something slightly different, would the game suddenly be less fun?

Well this thread I started got unexpectedly big

Thank you all who have participated especially The Composer for joining in, I only wish that the walls of text I saw in the last few pages had something to do with the topic I raised :P

Anyway I appreciate the on topic feedback from everyone and while I personally don't think that adding a spoil mechanic would bog the game down any more than the current Camp Provisions and Inventory management system already does, it would at least have the food gather system make some RP sense. Currently it's not anything more than an inconvenience and because those Pigs Heads never seem to spoil it makes the whole exercise feel meta rather than immersive. So anything that would increase the immersion even if it adds a click or two would be better than the current system.

Firstly and most importantly: Have food pulled directly from Camp Storage when Long Resting. This having to take food out of the Storage container before using it for the Long Rest needs to end as it is currently very annoying. The damn box is literally in the camp. If I'm going to have to click a couple of times it might as well be to use my Survival Skill and preserve food to gain something. If this was the only change in the food system I'd be happy

In Addition to that request above my current suggestion after reading peoples responses would be to have food spoil with a system something like this:

• 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.
• You can preserve food when at Camp with a successful Survival roll but failure would make the food useless. Successfully preserved food has half the weight, never spoils, and can be sold at 2x the value.
• 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.

To keep this from become a cumbersome mechanic some upgrades need to happen with the Camp Supplies Storage system:

• The addition of a button like "sell all wares" called "trash all spoiled food" that way you don't have to do it individually. I hesitate on it being automatic because seeing it adds to the immersion and if it's just one click it's not a big deal anyway.
• A similar way to Preserve all food for the same reason.

Regardless of whether or not a spoil system is added something needs to be done with the Camp Supplies inventory management system because in it's current form it's a burden.


Hi Composer!
I'm interested in your views on this. and the example a few posts down. thanks in advance.

I do ... that is exactly my goal.

GM4Him allready suggested in the past that Intellect Devourers on the beach, or Imps on the Nautiloid should be replaced with some "more acurate" enemies to our curent power level ...
And i dislike such idea ...

To me its perfectly fine to get enemies that have stats acurate to our curent power level ... while they take form of something that fits tone of adventure ...
And i really dont care that "this book say that they *should be* different". -_-

Basicaly killing giant rats, or lobsters, or rabid dogs, would be in my honest opinion ruining the experience. :-/

Good speech.
Except that you dont remove the DM ... you just remove possibility to interact with him "during the adventure" (wich i presume is what you mean) ...
Larian is still present as a DM in matter of deciding things ...

So ... basicaly ... we can dislike it, we can disagree with it, we can debate about it, and we certainly can coment it ... but that is basicaly all we can do.
Bcs it will be the way Swen (and others from Larian) decide.

I know that many people dislike DM who refuses to debate about anything and just insist on his way of doing things, no matter if they are RAW or Homebrew ... but that is simply limitation of choosen medium, and it will remain so until someone invents fully self aware AI ... and when they do, there is fair chance we will have more pressing matters to care about.

---

@GM4Him ...
Cant say im surprised ... its not the first time you just ended conversation ... but if that is what you wish, i cant stop you.
There is little reason anyway, if our previous talking taught me anything its that i can be sure you will start exactly same arguments few days later in completely different topic, to wich it would be also unrelated, just to state its off-topic, or you dont care anymore anyway, once you find yourself in dead end once again. :-/

Not really, if those items will be clearly marked as Junk, will transform into "bag of rotten food" wich will stack, and prefferably automaticly "marked as Wares" ...

As it all was suggested in this very topic.
I mean its nice you want to return to it, but would you mind reading it first?

How could is "spoil before you can use it" if spoiling (as people requested around here) is tied to Long Rests? O_o
I mean, this is turn-based game after all ...
Tying anything to real-time would be at least really weird. :-/

I dont even understand that "get more food in my inventory" part ...
As far as i know, you dont "get" any food ... you need to pick it, and if you have enough and feel that any more would just spoil ... why would you pick it?

But why?

Even puting aside all other arguments mentioning things like ... the fact that every single character you are talking with about tadpoles confrims to you that "you HAVE time" ... or the fact that you withnessed with your own eyes how ceremorphosis of theese tadpoles process and therefore you know it requires some illithid technology that is not around you ... or the fact that you meet other people who were tadpolized long before you and still dont show even first symptoms ... or the fact that you yourself didnt so far get even first symptom.
Puting all that aside completely ... and focusing only on that first part ...

Why do you demand other players to think what do you want?
Isnt that enough for YOU that YOUR characters in YOUR game will think that? O_o

Have you ever heared saying "to live and let live" ... how about "to play and let play"?

xD

I think that SR should cost food, but have no restrictions in quantity( as GM4Him suggested). It seems logical, because why LR costs food and SR doesn't

There is one tiny problem ... this "few clics" are the only *actual* limitation ...

If you remove the need to carry the food ... bcs you have covenient "send to camp" button ...
And if you also remove the need to pick the food from the crate ... bcs it will happen automaticaly ...

There is nothing stoping you to gather litteraly every single picece of food you find, so you allways have enough ... and dont care about it ever again.

In other words...
You could just delete this mechanic whole and the result would be exactly the same. :-/

The idea I have is to replace that with a spoilage system or just get rid of the whole system as it is. Like I said "If I'm going to have to click a couple of times it might as well be to use my Survival Skill and preserve food to gain something."

So yeah you're right but as the system currently is it's just an inconvenience, but if you replace it with what I'm suggesting it's essentially the same number of clicks (give or take) but now there is a RP reason for those clicks.

Anyway that's how I see it

I cant help the feeling that we are talking about different set of clicks.

I will say, spoiling food DOES add immersion in the sense that it is more realistic. Also, you get so much food right now in BG3, spoiling some wouldn't be all THAT bad... In theory. And if food just vanished from your inventory when spoiled, notifying you that X amount of camping supplies spoiled, that wouldn't be too bad.

Still, you create the "I should just rest as soon as I have enough food" issue. I don't know how you'd get around that. I suppose some sort of preservation Survival check might work and it WOULD create more purpose for the skill. Right now, there isn't much use for it, so that would be good.

What if skill check is automatic when you rest, and the higher the game has you roll, the more you preserve? So, roll 5-9, only 25% preserved of the perishable foods. 10-14 = 50%. 15-19 = 75%. 20+ = 100%.

Hmm. That might work. I kinda like that. Plus, it's automatic, so it doesn't require extra clicks.

I would go for this too: 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.

So, gaining a boost to recovery by spending food for SR.

I still want something for SR at the character level as opposed to the hard 2/day limit so I can heal only those I want to heal during SR. Or, maybe in combination of your idea, each PC has 2/day SR limit and can spend food for additional healing and maybe even after the 2/day, players can continue SR by spending extra food. I don't know. Just throwing out ideas.

I like where you are going with this, though. The preserve food mechanic would certainly be a game changer for your idea. That would then not promote frequent long rest.

How?

Anyone please explain this to me ...

Right now people hoard enough food so they can rest, when they want to ... nobody (as far as i know) ever mentioned anywhere around that there is any urge to rest as soon as possible ...
(maybe except when people were resting after every conversation in order to trigger conversations but that is hardly example of regular play)

But if food would spoil AFTER LONG REST ...
People would sudently feel some urge to go rest as soon as they would loot 40th unit of food?
Why? O_o

No. You are not a paid game designer. The manual is best. Larian needs to follow it.

Maybe.
So this is my usual experience when entering camp:

• Enter Camp
• Talk to folks etc.
• Walk to Bedroll
• Click 1 - Click on Bedroll
• Click 2 - Auto choose food. (realize I don't have enough on me )
• Click 3 - exit
• Walk over to Camp Supplies
• Click 4 - Open Camp Supplies
• Click 5 + Choose food
• Click Dunno at this point because of how many times I might need to click through all the food to get the 40 food I need but we'll call it one for best case scenario. Plus there's the likely clicks sending excess food back to the Camp Supplies once you return to the game...
• Click 7 - Exit
• Walk back to Bedroll
• Click 8 - Click on Bedroll
• Click 9 - add the food
• Click 10 - Sleep

So even if you remember to go to the Camp Supplies chest first or happen to have enough on your main character it's still 7 clicks minimum just to sleep.

My idea:

• Enter Camp
• Talk to folks etc.
• Walk to Camp Supplies
• Click 1 - Open Camp Supplies
• Click 2 - Throw away Spoiled Food (remember there's a toss all spoiled food option)
• Click 3 - Choose food to Preserve
• Click 4 & 5 - Preserve food (Survival Roll + Guidance)
• Potentially doing this more than once to not risk failing with all your food? So maybe more clicks...
• Click 6 - Exit
• Walk back to Bedroll
• Click 7 - Click on Bedroll
• Click 8 - add the food (Automatically chooses food from Camp Supplies to reach 40, defaults to fresh first)
• Click 10 - Sleep

So now we have 10 clicks minimum so a few more but we get a Survival Roll and the whole thing makes sense from an RP perspective. Plus food now has value because it doesn't last unless you preserve it. Also I imagine that once we enter cities like Baldur's Gate or areas without much food (the Underdark didn't have much maybe the journey to the Towers won't either?) then it becomes a real issue of whether or not you're going to buy food (probably expensive in a city) or have enough preserved food to get you through.

Anyway that's what I'm thinking

You get 40 food. Now you can long rest and no food spoils. You get 50 food and long rest. 10 food spoils. If you had rested at 40, you wasted no food. So, you are encouraged to rest as soon as you get 40 so you don't potentially waste food.

This, I do not like. Sorry. I'd much rather have the game automatically do a few of these item management things for me.

Clicks 1 and 2 can be replaced with "Game auto tosses useless, spoiled food not worth a gp. Why make us make 2 clicks to toss?

Clicks 3-6 can also be auto. Why make us manually do this? When you rest, character with highest Survival skill automatically rolls to see how much food is preserved of all the food you don't use that day.

Now. No extra clicks.

Or discouraged to gather any more ...
While you can continue adventuring howerever long you want? O_o

And this is how it would actualy looklike in my opinion:
And nothing else ...

Since there is still enough food in the world, so you dont really *need* to preserve anything ... you can just keep going around, looting another food, keep sending it to camp, and dont care about that crate at all ... your camp box is full of rotten food, so what?
You dont use it anyway.

And that is the problem ...
The only way food limits Long Resting is that picking food from the crate is anoying ... so people are holding some in their inventories ... if you would give that away, food would loose its only meaning.

It is even easier to step back and sell your food.
I bet it would be even easier to cheat with this mechanic.
The game is unlikely to track the dates for every food item on the map.
Technically the most likely solution would be to start the food spoiling when you have it in your inventory which means throwing it away should do the trick.
If it wasn't, the process would start as soon as food was in the player's inventory. Which again means you just don't pick up food when you don't need it.
Spoilage couldn't be global because at some point the player would only find spoiled food.

Not necesarily ...
I mean *we* dont know where boards of locations are, since the map is everything just mashed together ... but Larian should ... so, purely teoreticaly ... they *could* tie rotting of food to certain locations.

Also, not every food in the world should spoil ... i mean if you take basicaly any food you find inside the groove, it would be logical to presume they get rid of bad one, and gathered something else somehow.
It would look kinda off, if that Tiefling grandma who is cooking that soup would have rotten meat on those hooks in her little shop.

And finaly there is still that suggestion with processed food, that would not spoil.