Meat, Part Two

[nauta]

Simple question:

Do you think meat (in particular) and animal bits, in general, are too prevalent? 

I'm of two minds.  First, a master ranger can definitely run through the Vrun Driath region and come back with fifty pieces of chalton easily.  On the other hand, non Master rangers might suffer.

Solutions: make master skin not quite as masterful; make things like chalton and scrab give off less meat; make bodies rot (unskinnable) after a certain amount of time; more meat eater creatures (e.g., some critter that roams the Vrun gobbling up objects).

[bardlyone]

No, in fact, I think that until the creature who weighs, say, 200lb, is giving off 100lb of meat, it is artificially low.

I do think that people are killing more than they need to and leaving shit laying around and that is gross and cluttering and breaks immersion to a degree when it's food.

I can't help but wonder if you could simply tag skinned items that have not yet been picked up from the room they are skinned in, to disappear after X ticks the same way that veins/deposits/quarries of stones do. I think that would fix the problem. Also if it did the same to foraged rock that people leave laying around.

[Riev]

I'd be okay with mob corpses disappearing at a faster rate due to being baked in the sun.

I'm okay with nearly every body dropping -some- meat. Some animals are clearly meat animals (like chalton, versus scrab). I don't think that's the concerning part, at least for me.

I think eating raw meat vs cooked meat, or food items that come from a certain level of skill, should be noticeably more filling. Or raw meat having a chance to give you a sickness that lasts for a few IG hours.

[Riev]

random thought - What if there was an NPC like the poop buyer, that purchases ONLY RAW foods from a bag, and returns a pittance for bringing it in? Like, you bring them a full bag of meat, they might give you a small (and it takes a LOT of meat to fill a bag).

Then at least there is incentive to pick up the meat, and it'd make sense that the city pays for raw meats for cooking/etc.

[bardlyone]

random thought - What if there was an NPC like the poop buyer, that purchases ONLY RAW foods from a bag, and returns a pittance for bringing it in? Like, you bring them a full bag of meat, they might give you a small (and it takes a LOT of meat to fill a bag).

Then at least there is incentive to pick up the meat, and it'd make sense that the city pays for raw meats for cooking/etc.

This is neat, and would make sense if it was in the slaughterhouse, perhaps near the meat counter that sells all that meat - of course they could resell it at a markup.

[Delirium]

random thought - What if there was an NPC like the poop buyer, that purchases ONLY RAW foods from a bag, and returns a pittance for bringing it in? Like, you bring them a full bag of meat, they might give you a small (and it takes a LOT of meat to fill a bag).

Then at least there is incentive to pick up the meat, and it'd make sense that the city pays for raw meats for cooking/etc.

This is neat, and would make sense if it was in the slaughterhouse, perhaps near the meat counter that sells all that meat - of course they could resell it at a markup.

I like this. Sometimes you're not out there for the food alone, but you need X number of hides for Y project.

Being able to turn in all the edible bits would go a long way to making this feel less... weird.

[Riev]

It could even tie in with Ath's mention about turning in "tokens" to an NPC to track plot progress. Just have someone occasionally checking, if possible, the amount of meat that is getting turned in. That data alone might be able to drive some decisions from staff as to whether there is a lot of "useless" meat dropping or not.

[Miradus]

This is a little bit of a modern notion popping up into the game world. The concept of "wasting meat" isn't hardly known amongst tribal peoples. Not because they eat every part (some do, most don't) but because they eat the parts they like and leave the rest for their dogs or as carrion.

The modern notion is propped up by movies and literature which takes modern ideals and projects them back onto more primitive peoples. For example, "Dances With Wolves" where the Indians are horrified by the slaughter of the buffalo just for their pelts. 1st person accounts and anthropological studies have shown that most primitive cultures eat what they want and leave the rest. If they're hungry or in hard times they may consume more than normal, but in times of plenty they are pretty picky.

If the meat is a problem, don't blame the player hunter. It's a code issue. Do you blame the tavern sitters who spend 3 game days sitting at the bar chatting without ever buying a drink? Implement some clean-up code or mobs that will pick up or eat the meat.

[Synthesis]

The only mass-slaughter I see around lately is from mobs that are aggro.  So it's likely not that PCs are out spamkilling them for nefarious reasons, but that it's simply easier to kill it and move on than it is to flee and and risk a) wearing out your mount and b) not paying attention to where you're going and ending up in a bad spot.

[nauta]

I actually meant the question in terms of game play.  (My hunch is in the south, it is other mobs generating loads of bodies near reboot -- plus aggro mobs that you didn't want to fight in the first place.)


My characters end up junking a lot of meat -- sometimes I feed my beetle, sometimes I junk it at the NPC/vNPC spots that make sense, sometimes I leave it.

I guess the thought was: We implemented this meat decay code which I was supposed to motivate more hunting, but it still seems like there is a lot more meat out there than we need.

[Miradus]

My character is always thirsty, almost never hungry. I don't actually know that I've ever really even seen the hunger messages.

[Akariel]

Simple question:

Do you think meat (in particular) and animal bits, in general, are too prevalent?

I'm of the mind that they aren't, which is why I started the Meatcraft project. In this project what I'm doing with the help of numerous other staff and builders is trying to make sure every single thing in the game drops at least a little meat. Yes, this does open up the game to more people who go out hunting for specific things and leave their kills laying all around. Yes, this does mean some people will drop the offal and bone-marrow broth in favor of the steak. People leaving kill all over the ground, however, is something that could make an interesting plot.

http://gdb.armageddon.org/index.php/topic,51342.0.html
http://gdb.armageddon.org/index.php/topic,51343.0.html

I'm of two minds.  First, a master ranger can definitely run through the Vrun Driath region and come back with fifty pieces of chalton easily.  On the other hand, non Master rangers might suffer.

While the only released portion of Meatcraft right now is the Gol Krathu region (not including the Grey Forest), when we get down south I plan to tweak the way those races are skinned as well. This might be in the form of adding more meat, or it might be in the form of removing some. It might be making skinning particular things -more- difficult, or less. If you have thoughts on this, I'd love to hear them in a clan related: question request clanned to the Byn and titled ATTN: AKARIEL. I cannot and will not promise that I'll be able to use every idea, but I do always love getting insight on the topic.

Solutions: make master skin not quite as masterful; make things like chalton and scrab give off less meat; make bodies rot (unskinnable) after a certain amount of time; more meat eater creatures (e.g., some critter that roams the Vrun gobbling up objects).

1. Already working on it.
2. Bodies do rot - well, they disappear after a certain amount of time.
3. I'm not sure that's the issue, as they only eat bodies - not the left over mess from hunters who leave their skinnings behind. I'm up to different opinions, however.

No, in fact, I think that until the creature who weighs, say, 200lb, is giving off 100lb of meat, it is artificially low.

I agree, to some respects. Actually getting a 650 stone critter killed, skinned, cleaned, and then preserved would not only be a huge process I don't think anyone wants to deal with in their game, but would give you more meat than you or the entire playerbase could eat before it all rotted. So in some respects we do need to make sure that every creature isn't feeding the world, too, or becoming too tedious a process for people playing hunters.

I do think that people are killing more than they need to and leaving shit laying around and that is gross and cluttering and breaks immersion to a degree when it's food.

My best suggestion here is to always give other players the benefit of the doubt. You don't know why another character did something some way. They might have had a perfectly valid reason for it.

I can't help but wonder if you could simply tag skinned items that have not yet been picked up from the room they are skinned in, to disappear after X ticks the same way that veins/deposits/quarries of stones do. I think that would fix the problem. Also if it did the same to foraged rock that people leave laying around.

People leaving stuff around seems to be an issue that can be resolved by players through IC motivation and plot, rather than being ignored.

I'd be okay with mob corpses disappearing at a faster rate due to being baked in the sun.

I'm okay with nearly every body dropping -some- meat. Some animals are clearly meat animals (like chalton, versus scrab). I don't think that's the concerning part, at least for me.

I think eating raw meat vs cooked meat, or food items that come from a certain level of skill, should be noticeably more filling. Or raw meat having a chance to give you a sickness that lasts for a few IG hours.

This is already the case. Raw meat is not as nutritious for you as cooked meat. I decided not to go and make all raw meat poisonous, but it did cross my mind a few times.




Anyways y'all, I'm keeping an eye on this thread. I'm always open to hearing about new ideas in this field, and again, while I can't make any promises, it might give me an idea to branch off on.

[Riev]

I will say, the "slabs" of meat that are in the Gol now? They are amazing. I love that its more of a butchering, more of an ordeal now.

Right now, the chalton, scrabs, spiders, raptors... they just leave corpses everywhere, and either someone is getting free skinning lessons, or they're looking for only one out of the 5 things that skin off a corpse.

IC is IC is IC, and I get it, but when someone litters the entire Vrun Driath and nobody knows who or when? What do you do?

[Miradus]

Hear that, you filthy southies? When Akariel is done you'll be eating cock too.

The new skinned stuff in the north is pretty cool. More stuff on the ground. Hurray.

I dislike the idea of getting diseases from raw meat. It simply isn't common. For example, rabbits carry certain parasites that can make you really ill, but any rabbit infected with them is going to look incredibly sick and you won't be eating it. And there's very little chance of a disease crossing from say, insects to mammals.

I've had tribal characters who loved sinking their teeth into a big chunk of raw flesh straight from the kill. Not as filling? Sure. But remove it as a roleplay alternative completely? No like.

[Lizzie]

I really love the idea of a raw-parts-buyer. I even know WHO the buyer could be: an agent for the Union of Allied Allanaki Cooks local 420, who supplies raw bits for Byn stew, all other house stews/soups, and various sauces and stuffings used in preparation of house savory dishes.

The buyer could buy all raw meats, entrails, guts, eyeballs, brains, gellid masses of who the hell knows what. He'd buy it in the same way that the spice buyer in Red Storm buys spice - different types have different values, but he requires a minimum turn-in to get anything at all - with none worth more than "x" sids each.

[bardlyone]

stuff

I think the meat revamp is amazing.

I don't like seeing spammy stuff laying around outside, it's just the same thing that makes me compulsively use arrange over and over in an apartment so stuff decorating it doesn't run past a line. An aesthetics-based tic of sorts.

I know people are hunting more than they need to (for food alone) because I've played someone who works leathers who's had to hunt down more than a handful of things (thus more than they can eat) just to cover basic expenses for food, rent, mount rent, etc. Its just the nature of the skin code not dropping more hide, when you're messing up 3 out of 4 hides in either tanning or crafting and can get the meat of four animals but wind up with a 14 sid belt you can sell, not even covering mount rent.

That's why I like the proposed idea of the raw meat buyer or the notion of making the skinned stuff that doesn't get picked up disappear.

[Molten Heart]

.

[Jingo]

I think there needs to be a junk vendor that allows you to sell all those useless bits you'd collect from a kill. Even if it's for 10% of the item value.

Okay. I got the steak to last me another two ic days. What now? I don't bother picking up the hide or the bones or the horn because the market is already saturated at a quantity of five.

[Raptor_Dan]

I wish vultures would fight you over those bits of meat and entrails left out if you didn't get to them soon enough.

[Evilone]

I think in the south around nak we went from only having like spiders and scrab around, to a shitload of chalton. Synthesis is right tho. Its mostly npc critters killing each other leaving mass quantitied of meat on the ground. Maybe a couple chalton spawns need to be removed?

[bardlyone]

I think in the south around nak we went from only having like spiders and scrab around, to a shitload of chalton. Synthesis is right tho. Its mostly npc critters killing each other leaving mass quantitied of meat on the ground. Maybe a couple chalton spawns need to be removed?

I can't really agree with this with how many times I've gone out and found literally no chalton. Also, when an npc kills a chalton it makes a corpse which decomposes. When pcs wander the sands and skin the corpse and leave meat, bone, hide, whatever, laying around, THAT STUFF does not decompose, or at least only the meat does, and only slowly. That's a big part of the issue, people coming along and skinning these mass corpses laying around thanks to that scrab, and just leaving it all to (most of it NOT) rot.

[BadSkeelz]

I think duskhorn dicks should be a whip weapon.

[nauta]

Re: Chalton -

I think it's something about reboots -- the Vrun goes kind of crazy around then, and a lot of bodies are left.  I played a chalton farmer for a bit, and there's definitely some variability in how they spawn which I wasn't ever able to figure out.

Skinning them and leaving the bits is on a PC, but one doesn't have to assume bad form (perhaps they got distracted or whatever).  That said, you can always do:

Code Select Expand


get meat; junk meat (feeding ~beetle);


[Riev]

I think duskhorn dicks should be a whip weapon.

When I heard duskhorn dicks were BASICALLY a real thing, I got super excited.

Too bad in game, it wasn't really a thing that was relayed, and we spent in game HOURS scouring Allanak for a duskhorn's dick.

/derail


Nobody wants to be the guy to go around and clean up someone else's skinning mess. I know when I'm leading some sort of group, I tell them to junk or bury the "squishy" stuff because otherwise it'll attract spiders and other nasties. Not everyone follows suit.

I've walked down the road to the west and just seen literally 8 scrab corpses on the road. Sometimes its not even a corpse, but the full list of skinned items without a single thing taken. I think THIS is what people are talking about, not the "oh man a chalton killed another chalton in a fit of passion and now there is a random corpse out here.

[Reiloth]

Why not make skinned goods become hidden after a few minutes, and allow hunt to reveal them?

[Delirium]

Why not make skinned goods become hidden after a few minutes, and allow hunt to reveal them?

Love this idea.

[nauta]

Why not make skinned goods become hidden after a few minutes, and allow hunt to reveal them?

Love this idea.

Ooooo.  Tack on a script to desert rats and kagors to make them bury crap that they find.  Or: desert squirrels.

[bardlyone]

I actually love that idea. Plus a million.

[John]

Do you think meat (in particular) and animal bits, in general, are too prevalent?

Do you mean meat from an animal that has been skinned and then left to rot in the desert? This seems to be rarer then it was a year ago, although still much more common then it was many years ago.

I'm of two minds.  First, a master ranger can definitely run through the Vrun Driath region and come back with fifty pieces of chalton easily.

Sure. But what's the point? Any ranger that does this in one afternoon seems to be engaging in bad play. This is a player problem, not a game problem.

this does mean some people will drop the offal and bone-marrow broth in favor of the steak.

Some players may genuinely not realise that the offal being dropped is actually valuable and do genuinely leave the offal behind as "junk".

The biggest problem I see is the tan chalton hides. There's a tonne of them and they serve no useful function to the majority of the playerbase. Whenever I play outdoorsy characters I like to collect the hides and bury them in specific locations for me to go to in the event that I find a buyer for them. It takes only a small amount of time and tries to keep the game world in line with the documentation. It's also the best IC reaction I can think of for my character.

they only eat bodies - not the left over mess from hunters who leave their skinnings behind. I'm up to different opinions, however.

It'd be awesome if they could eat meat objects that are in the room. Imagine getting chased by a scrab and having it stop to eat some meat.

I really love the idea of a raw-parts-buyer. I even know WHO the buyer could be: an agent for the Union of Allied Allanaki Cooks local 420, who supplies raw bits for Byn stew, all other house stews/soups, and various sauces and stuffings used in preparation of house savory dishes.

If this was put into the game, having it be near the Byn compound by a bynner would be awesome.

Why not make skinned goods become hidden after a few minutes, and allow hunt to reveal them?

+1

[tortall]

Why not make skinned goods become hidden after a few minutes, and allow hunt to reveal them?

+5!!

[Riev]

Hunt is the new Search.

[Miradus]

Why not make skinned goods become hidden after a few minutes, and allow hunt to reveal them?

Actually, that's a brilliant solution.

About 3 days ago I came across a coyote kill site on a walk. Either they brought a deer down or a car had injured one and they found it wounded in the brush. In the main area was a rib cage and part of a spine but scattered all around within about 30' were the leg bones, skull, and other assorted parts. It took a bit of looking to figure out what had happened and find what was left.

[Patuk]

Bury code, motherfucker.

[Miradus]

Bury code, motherfucker.

If they aren't bothering to pick up and junk the shit, you think they're going to bury it?

Personally, I am not bothered by parts laying around. Everything is valuable to someone. If the economics of the game weren't as weird as they are then you'd have players scavenging the entire desert clean to bring in those parts that richie rich ranger just left behind. Instead you got a player base of 100+ people competing to sell 5 chalton hides to the same NPC merchant. So they become worthless except to some merchant grinding up tanning.

[Patuk]

No, no. I'm saying you could let things lying around in outdoors rooms be automatically buried after X minutes. They don't even have to be skinned goods; everything short of an actual boulder is going to be displaced before long, I feel.

[nauta]

No, no. I'm saying you could let things lying around in outdoors rooms be automatically buried after X minutes. They don't even have to be skinned goods; everything short of an actual boulder is going to be displaced before long, I feel.

Sand squirrels!

Code Select Expand


Some strips of tan hide.
Some piles of bone.
Some flanks of meat.
A furry-tailed sleek squirrel arrives from the west.

A furry-tailed sleek squirrel gets a strip of tan hide.

A furry-tailed sleek squirrel buries a strip of tan hide.


[Miradus]

No, no. I'm saying you could let things lying around in outdoors rooms be automatically buried after X minutes. They don't even have to be skinned goods; everything short of an actual boulder is going to be displaced before long, I feel.

Ah, I see what you mean.

In some terrains that would make sense. Like sand dunes.

When I stepped off a C-130 into the Saudi desert (way back in the early 90's) for the first time, I was shocked. I had pictured a Lawrence of Arabia desert. What I saw instead was parking lot that stretched from horizon to horizon. Everything (like sand) that could blow away had already blown away over the past millenia and was likely residing in Yemen. What was left was rock and hardpan. As I got out of the city and started moving north into Iraq, you would see these scrub bushes completely covered in toilet paper. The Bedouin love toilet paper, for some reason. It's like the only thing they adopted from western culture. They still crap on the ground, but now they wipe with toilet paper and then just let it go in the wind, where it goes sailing across the terrain for miles until it finally finds a thorny bush to land in. Southern Iraq actually looks kind of festive until you get close and realize that the streamers are actually crap-smeared toilet paper flapping in the wind.

What were we talking about again? Oh, yeah. Code burying.

[WithSprinkles]

Animals burying things would be fun, actually. From hides, to meat and bones to, "Hey, I'm out scavenging with a shovel and a prayer and I found... someone's body.."

...

Jackpot?

[Delirium]

If I could wave a magic wand, what would happen would be this.

>look
The body of a tan-shelled gurth is here.

>skin body
You strip a domed shell off the carcass.

>look
A domed shell is here.
The skinned carcass of a gurth is here.

>craft carcass
You could make a butchered gurth from that. [skinning, easy]

>craft carcass into butchered
You begin carving the carcass.

You flay strips of meat from the carcass.
You salvage a few pieces of bone.
You salvage some fat and tallow from the carcass.

That way, people who just need the hide/shells would get those, and the carcasses would be left behind.

Eventually covered by sand (i.e. bury code), and when you hunt, and get "there was a battle here recently", you could search for carcasses.

[Riev]

Delirium's idea is a good one. Most of us when we go hunting (in game) are there for the hides, or shells. SOMETIMES for the bones, and honestly somewhat rarely the meat. I'd almost (almost) be for skinning to only affect the initial skinning of the shell/hide, and leave carcass to cooking skill. Not quite, but it'd be more for "butchers" than for hunters.

[IntuitiveApathy]

I like Delirium's idea as well.  Originally, my idea was to add filter variables to the skin command, much like forage has now where you can look for only the certain thing that you want and ignore the rest.  I suppose the two ideas could still be combined where you could have something like the following:

> skin body shell
You manage to cleanly slice the dark, red-spotted shell from the body of a dark-shelled scrab.
(or: You don't manage to pull the shell from the body in one piece.)

> look
A partially butchered scrab carcass lies here.

And then throw in the fancy new crafting possibility code which would return remaining available skinning results based on what's left and probability by skinning skill level:

> ex carcass (or: skin carcass skinnables?)
You think you could skin some meat from the carcass.  (easy)
You think you could cut a pincer from the carcass. (manageable)
You think you could obtain the gelid brains from the carcass. (difficult)

You could then play with things further and have skill at skinning dictate what might be left over in a carcass (or whether a carcass is left at all, which is kind of how it works now), and/or how many more times you could further skin the carcass to get something else, etc.


As to body decay, I agree that it seems that bodies of any sort take too long to decay.  Realistically, opportunistic scavengers should be attracted to any bodies or edible animal parts left alone (or even not left alone) in fairly short order.  In Zalanthas, there are all sorts of animals that could qualify - gortok and vultures seem like very obvious examples, but I think just about anything that isn't a strict herbivore should be a scavenger in a harsh world such as Zalanthas.  This would be a good route to have corpses disappear or go into various partial states of decay faster - a simple room echo/ldesc change leading to coded body changes to reduce skinnable items over time would work fine:

> l e
A skinned scrab carcass lies here.  There is a flock of vultures picking at it.

> e
* A flock of vultures take flight at your arrival, alighting from a skinned scrab carcass.
A partially eaten scrab carcass lies here.

> skin carcass meat
You only manage to pull one good cut of meat from the partially eaten carcass, most of it having been picked off.

If wanting to spice things up a little, maybe make a random chance for an aggressive predator (or three) to show up, having been attracted by the kill, or the scavengers.

The disappearing body --> findable by hunt skill route makes less sense to me here, but I could see it being fun and adding to the hunt skill (though ranger outdoor utility has always been through the roof already).

[gotdamnmiracle]

More "vultures". A different variant of carrion feeder for each biome. I could see most of the gol krathu with a single gortok of poor health that eats long left out bodies. Maybe vestrics in the Grey.

They work great in the Za. It's only a bummer that they trip agro code and then you have a rantarri sitting on top of a mountain of vultures. Then I guess the solution would be to have the rantarri eat the corpses, huh?

But seriously, if they didn't trip agro then you could give them flee code and lengthen the time it takes to eat a corpse. Suddenly you can have them acting like the nuisance you'd expect and also the clean up crew.

[Rathustra]

MESA VULTURES~!!!!!!!!

[Miradus]

Why not vNPC vultures?

Especially if the echo code was neat enough to tell you something like "You see vultures circling overhead to the west." to indicate a corpse was a couple of rooms to your west.

[Akariel]

To the butcherable creatures: It was definitely something we considered going into this project. In fact, if you look around the Gol Krathu, you can find at least two creatures that skin into a carcass in addition to items. That's where the evolutionary path took me.


Also, Bahamet got a touchup like you're talking about. I did decide to do that, but limit it to the massive critters. Thanks to Eukelade for working on that.


I quite like the idea myself. It's more realistic, cuts down on clutter, and is generally a pretty good one. The unfortunate problem with it is that it takes a -lot- of resources to make for everything. This is already a project I've spent over a year working on, and I'm not even halfway done. Adding an additional object wouldn't take too much time the first, or second, or third one - but when it's every. single. animal it gets a bit mindnumbing to make a carcass object each time. I've already seen that while I do have the drive to get this sort of project done, writing up steaks for every single animal is just as mindnumbing and hard. (Which is why you can enjoy a nice dusky dong from time to time. Creativity!)


The other hassle with the prospect of adding buterable carcasses was the crafting recipes. I can only put in so many crafts at one time, then they need to be approved. Every craft from the carcass would take up one of a very finite number of crafts I can make at once, and I am routinely hitting my limit -without- them. To add these crafts to the project would, in my mind, take too much time for too little gain.


It's a great idea, and I really wanted to do it at one point - but the reality of the situation meant it was something I needed to cut to get the project off the ground.

[Miradus]

Some questions Akariel ... just curious.

Have you ever butchered an animal in real life?

For the wide variety of make-believe animals you had to come up with recipes for, how did you research what they would butcher down into or the process by which it's done?

A gortok? I'm pretty sure I understand what a dog would butcher into. A geth? No idea. Like a possum with a bunch of drumsticks, I guess.

[nauta]

Why not vNPC vultures?

Especially if the echo code was neat enough to tell you something like "You see vultures circling overhead to the west." to indicate a corpse was a couple of rooms to your west.

I'm not sure, but I think the vulture AI in the valley actually hovers over the corpse.  If it doesn't, it'd be neat if it could.  It'd be neat to be able to look out and see a vulture and think: ooo, there's a corpse over there.  Let's investigate.

(I gotta say that the NPCs that devour whole corpses could use a little lag put on them.  It's always hilarious to hop off the mount, get the skinning knife out, and see the that little furry thing eat that body right up in a split second.)

This is a bit of a derail, but I just wanted to say I love some of the NPC scripts out there.  There's been tonnes of work put into some of the critter culture on Arm over the years -- from bahamet roaming patterns to gith scout routines to vulture codes and some things I think are best found out IC.   

I just love playing my hunters as actually doing a bit of hunting, using cues from the track code and the NPCs to chase down prey.  I like being able to have a hunter who 'learns' the ways of the animals, and in some cases the AI is just right that you can actually teach other hunters these ways.  (You still have to do some pretending, but in a lot of cases you don't have to do much.)

The other hassle with the prospect of adding buterable carcasses was the crafting recipes.

Code Select Expand


You lather up the carcass with a slab of escru butter.


If it wasn't clear: mega kudos on the meat code in the Gol.  Now we just have to wait for the mastercrafters to catch up with supply.

[Akariel]

Some questions Akariel ... just curious.

Have you ever butchered an animal in real life?

Yep. I've been a hunter since I was nine, and I've been fishing longer than that. I've done my fair share of butchering and cleaning carcasses over the years. Admittedly, my practice with larger animals is limited - but I've had some.

For the wide variety of make-believe animals you had to come up with recipes for, how did you research what they would butcher down into or the process by which it's done?

We start with a spreadsheet of what they currently skin into, and I tag anything that needs to be changed - or have crafting recipes added to it - in yellow. Then we spend about a month or more going over all the creatures we'll be working on (Gol Krathu, South of Luir's, Tablelands, Grey Forest, Silt Sea, ect.) and putting in ideas on what we think this creature should drop. Sometimes these ideas stick, and when they do, I generally do some google research for about a day or two and then I write them up if it still makes sense. The NSA probably thinks I'm a terrorist by now, or at least a bezoar deviant.

A gortok? I'm pretty sure I understand what a dog would butcher into. A geth? No idea. Like a possum with a bunch of drumsticks, I guess.

For the more wild creatures out there it's kind of hard. The easiest way to go about things is - does it have a hide/chitin? Does it have a steak? If the answer is no to either of those things, make it. Sometimes I get a creative spark and make something a little different than the norm. Sometimes I get a lot creative and spend a week making kryl meat. It really depends on the creature. Generally speaking, I find I'm at my most creative with creatures that are more dangerous, or that I personally like better.

[Miradus]

That's a lot of work. For my part, I think it's working out well.

Good job!

[Delirium]

Yeah, that's why I said "magic wand"... the work involved would be insane, no matter which way you cut it.

[Patuk]

no matter which way you cut it.

ehehehehehehehehehehehehe

[IntuitiveApathy]

To the butcherable creatures: It was definitely something we considered going into this project. In fact, if you look around the Gol Krathu, you can find at least two creatures that skin into a carcass in addition to items. That's where the evolutionary path took me.


Also, Bahamet got a touchup like you're talking about. I did decide to do that, but limit it to the massive critters. Thanks to Eukelade for working on that.


I quite like the idea myself. It's more realistic, cuts down on clutter, and is generally a pretty good one. The unfortunate problem with it is that it takes a -lot- of resources to make for everything. This is already a project I've spent over a year working on, and I'm not even halfway done. Adding an additional object wouldn't take too much time the first, or second, or third one - but when it's every. single. animal it gets a bit mindnumbing to make a carcass object each time. I've already seen that while I do have the drive to get this sort of project done, writing up steaks for every single animal is just as mindnumbing and hard. (Which is why you can enjoy a nice dusky dong from time to time. Creativity!)


The other hassle with the prospect of adding buterable carcasses was the crafting recipes. I can only put in so many crafts at one time, then they need to be approved. Every craft from the carcass would take up one of a very finite number of crafts I can make at once, and I am routinely hitting my limit -without- them. To add these crafts to the project would, in my mind, take too much time for too little gain.


It's a great idea, and I really wanted to do it at one point - but the reality of the situation meant it was something I needed to cut to get the project off the ground.

Would it be possible to enlist our help here in the form of a call for submissions?  We know what the critters look like, so I don't think it'd be much of a stretch for us to write up some carcass objects, or anything else?

Otherwise, it'd be happy enough to just have a filterable skin command and have it end up much like forage where all the other stuff you're not looking for is just gone (in the case of forage, other unwanted forageables don't "appear" even in the case where you would have otherwise succeeded for other items).

[Akariel]

Unfortunately, the -main- problem is that limit on craft recipes I was talking about. I have already got in touch with some players who seemed interested in the new skinning stuff and gotten some items from them - but carcasses are off the table for right now due to the limit, mostly. (I probably should have made it clear that was the main issue)

If you -do- have ideas for things to skin off of creatures though, or more particularly, if you think a creature isn't dropping something that it should (a form of edible product, a resource item described on the creature but not dropped) send in a request and we can talk there.

[Hauwke]

What do you mean thats the issue? Can the database not handle much more of that sort of thing?

[Akariel]

Our processes on staff require that every crafting recipe go through an approval process. I put in about twenty at a time, and then one of our admins needs to approve those twenty crafts. This is normally a mutli-day process. I cannot put in more than twenty recipes at any one time. That means that when I have my crafting list full, I need to wait for it to be approved before I can submit more. My list is normally full with a mixture of meatcraft, mastercrafts, and a few other things that pop up through the days. (Being a tribal staffer, whenever someone asks for something to be loaded, I try to make sure it has a craft, or I make a new craft.)

That means that that hard limit of twenty limits forward progress. So to try to cut some time off this multi-year project, I'm trying to stay away from things like having to craft carcasses into the parts people can get through just skinning. (Though the skinning files themselves is also a multi-day process to change since someone needs to go through and make sure I didn't make any spelling errors to any of the echoes you get, and I'm dropping the right object.)

Once my craft slots are freed, the objects I've made in that time normally require ~20 more crafts to be made, so it's another wait. Adding carcasses onto that would take up precious space in that, and turn this project from a period of two years to perhaps three or maybe four. We have quite a lot of animals in the databese, and we're not just doing the ones you see every day.

[IntuitiveApathy]

Our processes on staff require that every crafting recipe go through an approval process. I put in about twenty at a time, and then one of our admins needs to approve those twenty crafts. This is normally a mutli-day process. I cannot put in more than twenty recipes at any one time. That means that when I have my crafting list full, I need to wait for it to be approved before I can submit more. My list is normally full with a mixture of meatcraft, mastercrafts, and a few other things that pop up through the days. (Being a tribal staffer, whenever someone asks for something to be loaded, I try to make sure it has a craft, or I make a new craft.)

That means that that hard limit of twenty limits forward progress. So to try to cut some time off this multi-year project, I'm trying to stay away from things like having to craft carcasses into the parts people can get through just skinning. (Though the skinning files themselves is also a multi-day process to change since someone needs to go through and make sure I didn't make any spelling errors to any of the echoes you get, and I'm dropping the right object.)

Once my craft slots are freed, the objects I've made in that time normally require ~20 more crafts to be made, so it's another wait. Adding carcasses onto that would take up precious space in that, and turn this project from a period of two years to perhaps three or maybe four. We have quite a lot of animals in the databese, and we're not just doing the ones you see every day.

Are there any other staffers with less of an object load that we could rope in?  Sounds like you're hugely maxed out!

[Hauwke]

Huh, and you still found time to do echos when I was under your group.

[Rathustra]

The caracass system is building a square block (the objects themselves) as a solution to a round hole (how skinning currently works). The idea has some merit, but it should probably require adjustment to the underlying code instead of brute forcing it by creating hundreds of carcass objects and handling things via the crafting code.

This would be a sea change in how skinning is implemented in the game - so while I'm not saying it flat out /won't/ happen - it's a very large project even before we get into crowdsourcing things.

[Akariel]

I've taken a few steps that should alleviate the number of corpses being made in the desert. Seems there were some rooms with upwards of 50 bodies just lying there, so this should make sure that doesn't happen again.

[WithSprinkles]

    12/08/2016
        Chalton made more deadly. Beware!
        --Akariel


If this is part of it, just.. ahahahahahaha!

[Fathi]

Staff, feel free to edit this out if it's revealing too much, but back when I was a builder on Arm Reborn, 'skin' and 'butcher' being totally separate commands was an idea that was definitely mooted and I think possibly even accepted as the way we were going forward. The idea was that even an utterly unskilled hunter could still 'butcher' a carcass for meat at the expense of potentially salvaging the pelt/shell/etc, whereas if you had the skin skill you could skin it first.

But just like Akariel says, that involved a lot of work. I had a table I was putting together of what every single animal and humanoid in the game would break down into if you skinned it vs butchered it and was working on putting together a numerical table of what potential success/failure rolls would look like.

It's a decision that, like Rathustra says, would be a sea change. It's also a decision that is a lot easier to implement from the ground up rather than replacing piecemeal an existing system.

Annnnd back to the present discussion about piles of animal parts in the wilderness:

One reason why people may be leaving meat around is that now that meat spoils, there's no real reason to hold onto heaps of it. All the NPCs only buy five of each type of meat, and there's no sense in carrying around a bunch of food on your person that'll just go bad.

It's not personally what I'd do but I can kind of understand it.

"People are leaving animal parts all over the place" is a complaint that's cropped up several times over the years and it's always sorted itself out, i.e. there's probably only a couple people doing it and it'll stop once they just die or move on. Remember when everybody in Tuluk was so mad people were leaving gortok parts everywhere that some nobles tried to pass a law making it illegal?

Also, like Synthesis says, in the Vrun a lot of the aggro NPCs tend to kill each other, which could be causing some of the corpse pile-ups.

[Miradus]

I personally observed a few days ago an aggressive tracking mob that chased me into an area with a bunch of passive, weaker mobs.

I ditched his tracking code but when I came back the next RL day he was still in the spot where he ought not be and there were piles and piles of dead passive mobs.