Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Quality of life suggestion for Supplies and Long Rests

So there's a party stash at camp we can use to store our stuff, right?

Why not just have a 'Supplies Chest' that we can send our food and supply packs to, that automatically eats (ha) the items and then tallies up how many units of supply we sent to it? And then have our long rests deduct from that number? None of this fishing stuff out from storage to long rest.

I think they're trying to keep inventories separate so in multi-player you can't eat (ha) someone else's supplies up. But for just single players, this would alleviate a big issue with supplies and encumbrance.

I'm legit curious because I'm not sure how long rests work in multiplayer, but doesn't the entire party still have to long rest together there? Or are long rests done on a per player basis?

If it's the former, I don't see why this would be a problem there. Either way, I don't think you could eat someone else's supplies, since it's the act of sending food items to storage/the supply chest that this entire proposal revolves around to begin with. You could still keep your food in your personal inventories or the main stash if there was any possibility of you needing to use them for other purposes.

There are so many admin issues in this game that seemly only exist because Larian developers either:

1) Love pointless soul-sucking admin as a game element.
2) Prioritise multi-player mechanics over a single player experience.

I think in this case we're looking at #2.

Well.. not entirely serious. I think they will improve this a bit. I imagine a lot of the reason is due to the changes they've made to supplies generally, and the management side of it has yet to catch up. Or at least I hope that's the case.

I haven't tried multi-player yet, but I know people can drop in or out. If they left items in shared stash, I wonder if other players could use it. I can image such a system being abused.

I'm fairly sure everything in shared stash has always been a free for all in regards to multiplayer, or in theory it is.

My proposal is just a separate supply stash that takes food items, eats them (as in, removes them from the game since it'd be one less thing for the game to keep track of), and automatically tallies up how many units of supply you sent in. The only way to deduct this number would be through taking long rests, since presumably anything you send in can't be retrieved back.

I haven't tried multiplayer since Patch 4, so I don't how it works for food. But, as far as the core Long Rest is concerned, all players have to agree to go to sleep and have a Long Rest. So, unless Larian has implemented a per-player food consumption and per-player Long Rest benefits, there is no benefit whatsoever to keep food for yourself and not share with your friend (or, shall I say, "friend").

Yes, but players don’t take characters with them - all the characters and items stay under control of the host.at least that’s how it worked in D:OS1&2.

Bcs then the whole system would completely loose its point ...

I also highly doubt that "send to camp" is meaned as many people uses it:
"As covenient infinite inventory for everything they want to loot, but dont want to drag around, since it cause encumberance."
In other words ... i believe this kind of usage of that feature is an exploit.

Just think about it ...
You need to "send in camp" every piece of food one-by-one ... thats anoying.
You then need to travel to crate that is suspiciously far from your bedroll ... thats anoying.
You then need to pick that food from crate one-by-one ... thats anoying.
And finaly you need to travel back ... potentialy encumbered ... thats DEFINIETLY anoying.
Why?
Bcs this is not NVIDIA.
(the way it should be played ... just a little joke i couldnt resist )

People demanded limitation for Long Rest ...
Larian invented food limitation ...
Since they had to satisfy both groups ... they had to create system that will encourage you to think about when will you rest, but also allow you to rest any and every time you want ... and that is exactly what this do:
- You can either gather some food drag it around ... and be bothered by the fact it takes you inventory space ... but then you rest easily ... and you "are" in fact kinda limited bcs you cant easily loot every food in the world.
- Or you can send it to camp ... have free inventory ... but then you get to anoyance with resting ... so again, you "are" kinda limited, bcs it bothers you to keep draging food out of that box and take it to your bedroll.

This is the way food system "limits" us ... we dont want to be bothered, so we try not to be bothered.
Its not hard limitation, as some hardcore people demanded, there is easy way around (even easier once we start to exploit send to camp) ... but its still limiting, in some way.

Once that would be automatized ...
It would not be Quality of Life improvement ... it would be deleting Long Rest limitation
The system would have litteraly no point ... every single piece of food you would find you would simply send to camp, automaticly and without any care, since the camp inventory is unlimited ... and then you would simply have it consumed, again automaticly, again without any care ...
It would be basicaly impossible to make "partial Long Rest" (wich allready kinda is btw, i know) ...

One more word for this ...
Maybe its a naive idea ... but i really want to believe that there is one more reason for this system.
Many people around here are still complaining that food system isnt limiting enough, since there is too much food in the world, while other people around here are still complaining that the need to gather any food is anoying for them ... so what i want to (maybe naively) believe is that Larian will include to Difficiulty settings some kind of slider that will incerase, or reduce amount of food our party need to rest.
And that would also be completely useless, if this whole would be automatized.

@Rag at this point food system IS pointless. It doesn’t limit resting, food isn’t useful outside resting, so there is no reason not to send it to the camp, and micromanagement of retrieving it from the chest is still less inventory management then getting encumbered due to carrying food. Having people interact with a pointless mechanic doesn’t make it any less pointless.

The biggest addition that food system brought is that we can no longer chomp on an apple in the middle of a combat encounter to heal. We can keep that, while reducing food management to the level the mechanic deserves.

Or. Better yet. You pick up a food item and it instantly just goes towards the Camping Supplies total. It doesn't even appear in your items. In this way, you don't even have to send to camp or manage all those little food items at all.

I believe what he's saying is that the limiting factor *is* the hassle.

*

Personally, I suspect that the details of the resting system just haven't been introduced in the patches yet. I think they'll seriously tweak the amount of food available and the cost of resting.

Exactly. ^_^

And I don’t think that’s a case, though maybe as I tend to rest too little rather then to often perhaps I just under appreciate amount of tedium this system adds for someone resting often


It’s possible - after all when introducing the system Sven mention that cost of resting will raise as we progress - something we have not seen in EA.

Personally, I can’t see this system becoming anything more then a minor exercise in tedium. Create an actual limit of food that you can get and you risk players getting stuck during their playthrough.

The food/supplies system currently marries a complely vestigial and irrelevant mechanic to a lot of tedious and unnecessary inventory busywork.
It's the worst of both worlds, really.

If they want to keep it as it, they could at least take a page from what Lords of Xulima is and make food an "abstract resource" that raise a counter in a corner (already there, incidentally) without all the cluttering inside our bags (and/or the need to juggle things from local inventory to camp chest and viceversa).

And this is pretty much what I am suggesting in this megathread:

https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=820599#Post820599

Automate the food resources mechanic. Make Survival skill a more valuable skill to have by making it so that when you find food, you make a Survival roll to see how many Camping Supplies you actually glean from said food resource. Add spells like Create Food and Water and Purify Food and Drink to help increase how many Camping Supplies you get from each food item... etc. Then raise the cost of SR and LR so it balances out (or reduce how many food items you actually provide in the game), and viola.

Imagine how this would work in BG3. You find a carrot. You Take it from the barrel. Camping Supplies goes up by 1. No carrot item in your inventory. No added weight. It's like the game auto-Sent To Camp for you and then made it so you could just auto-Pull From Supplies when you rest. You don't have to do anything but pick up the carrot.

Find a pig's head. Counter goes up by 30. No pig's head item in your inventory. Nothing to manage. It's all done for you.

There are fringe cases at the start of the game where selling some food items will earn you a decent chunk of gold, along with the option to give a fish to a bear to get it to move out of the way, but beyond that, yeah the food mechanic right now is just inventory busywork that could stand to be simplified.

Exactly the point.

Pillars of Eternity had something like this, where the higher the difficulty you selected, the fewer supplies you could carry. (At the highest difficulty you could only have 1 at a time iirc - so between each rest you would need to find more. This made boss-areas harder because unlike lower difficulties, you just couldn't rest)
And one achievement was linked to the number of times you rested during one full playthrough. (No Rest for the Pro - rest less than 10 times) As far as I know, Obsidian made it like that because there were a lot of complaints about the game being too easy when you could rest all the time. This is something that some BG3 players have complained about as well... It was an interesting challenge and plenty of people tried it so maybe Larian could take some inspiration from that but I don't know if it would work when we need to rest for companion scenes, tadpole dreams, quest triggers (like Raphael's visit), etc.
And PoE only used 1 object (camping supplies) instead of a number of different objects, so the clutter/camp supplies/inventory micro-management problem we have here didn't come up.

@Neleothesze “Well, actually” it was 2 camping supplies:-P. Also PoE didn’t really have inventory management (unless someone opted out of stash). That was an actual attempt to pace rests through tedium, as while you could trek back to town to buy more, pacing your rests resulted in more enjoyable experience.

It worked really well for me, but I hear it didn’t work well for everyone. Obsidian ditched rest limitation (and per rest resources) for the sequel, so it wasn’t perfect either.