Meat, Part Two

[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.