Urban Forage

[Fathi]

As anyone who's ever been in the slum area of a major city (or seen the movie District 9) can tell you, large cities full of the oppressed poor are often full of garbage and random junk. This is often portrayed in Armageddon via mere mentions in room descriptions and the occasional coded midden heap, but I'd like to see it fleshed out a bit more.

Zalanthas' poorest city residents, in my eyes, have always been a culture of thrifty scavengers, willing to peel the blood-soaked boots off their dead buddies' feet in hopes of maybe scoring an extra few dozen coins. This is doubly so--as in you'd stab your buddy in order to get said boots--in areas like the 'Rinth, Undertuluk, and Luir's Outposts' outer baileys.

All that in mind, I'd love a command where city characters could put their foraging skills to use in certain areas of the game, such as rooms with appropriate mdescs and midden heaps.

Forage Food could net you things like:
Pieces of bread, rotten food, scraps of meat, burned things that might have been thrown out.

Forage Rocks could result in:
Blocks of granite from old buildings, pieces of sandstone, shards of flint/agate/obsidian from broken things, the occasional chunk of onyx/jasper/what-have-you.

Forage Artifacts might be more along the lines of:
Pieces of bone, scraps of cloth/leather, empty bags, torches, a scant few items of tattered clothing.

I doubt I've come up with everything good that might be forageable in an ubran environment, but that's the meat and potatoes of the idea.

[Cutthroat]

Oh yes.

The 'trash heap' rooms in Allanak and alleys in Tuluk should be forageable rooms for these sorts of things. Certain places in the 'rinth and UT as well.

[Zoltan]

Agreed. Awesome idea.

[Kassindra]

I like this idea. It'd work wonderfully I think.

[MarshallDFX]

Wow.  I like this idea a lot.

[Rhyden]

Yes.

[Spoon]

Foraging in the old Tuluk ruins pretty much yielded these results. I remember having a PC make a living from it early on.

[AmandaGreathouse]

Yes please. I've always liked the thought of something similar to this being put in, so +1 from me.

[My 2 sids]

This would rock!

[Spoon]

Guys, this is already implemented, just most likely not flagged in the areas you suggest. Pretty sure you can't forage for food though.

[The7DeadlyVenomz]

I'm down with it.

[JustAnotherGuy]

Having played a PC before that lived in slummy places...  this would have been greatly useful.

[Lizzie]

I thought this was already implemented, it's just that some rooms had been foraged SO much that there was nothing left to forage.

I mean..if you're on a city block and you're foraging for rocks, you'll only find so many loose rocks before you have to get the battle-axe and start busting down some buildings for more, or risk being arrested for ripping up the street just for a chunk of isilt.

Same thing with artifacts - in some areas, there were ruins..and those ruins were scavenged for years and years and years - a single building's worth of stuff...took the RL equivalent of 30 years to pick through by hundreds of people. It's all gone. There's nothing left to pick. What's left, is whatever you see in the room description. Three buildings and a pile of unusable unsellable rubble.

[valeria]

I think in a downtown slum area, it would be different than a 'ruins' type of area, and you wouldn't have as much problem with there being no more stuff to forage.  Because people would constantly be throwing out rotten/burned food, broken furniture, tools busted beyond repair, and rags in their refuse.  It would then trickle down to the next lowest strata of people, who are even poorer and think it's worthwhile to pick up.

[spicemustflow]

I thought forage artifacts in the city already functions like OP proposes? At least I am finding random junk at low levels of the skill. Food would be nice, though, but only at higher levels, as I don't think the horde of beggars that roam the streets would pass any scrap they find.