IDEA: Nerf Skin

[nauta]

Grains of salt first.  This is from a few months ago after the new meat regime came in, and this is just from the perspective of my character.

Praise second.

1.  I love all the new meat objects.
2.  I love the simulated desert environment, in terms of all the different critters and how tough they are.

Observation third: there's too much meat!

So here's the proposal: nerf skin.

(a) Add a delay to it so it isn't instant.
(b) Swap each level down one, so what is 'master' now is 'advanced' equivalent, what is 'advanced' is 'journeyman' equivalent, etc.  Hence, you partial fail more so you don't get as much meat from a critter as often.

Bonus suggestion: nerf fruits.  Make plants produce fewer fruits on reboot, or even none at all and let them grow naturally after reboot.

[Molten Heart]

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[Riev]

Or making "skinning" into a craft skill, since you can use objects in the room, now.

craft bahamet
You could make:
#1 a cleaned out shell
#2 three large hunks of meat
#3 a pristine bahamet egg
etc

craft scrab.corpse
You could make:
#1 a pristine, workable shell
#2 a couple hunks of meat
#3 A collection of bits (entrails, pincers, head)


Give people something they're really -after- with a dead creature. Maybe at Master Level, add a #4 - a set of shell, meat, and egg if you're really good, lucky, or greedy.

Bonus: Comes with delay timers like all other crafting skills.

[Kryos]

I actually would take a different stance on this.  I've skinned a few things in real life, and the way I'd like to see skin tuned is that failures on simple components are greatly reduced to nearly impossible.  Harvesting meat from a body is . . . not hard.  Getting the hide is similarly trivial, though it is time intensive.  Further, if you down a deer and work the meat, you could feed a family for days, a person for weeks.  In that respect, due to Arm's code not requiring tones of daily caloric intake and abstracting it a bit instead, its not too bad.  I can't comment on all meat skins from all animals, but for instance, dropping a bahamet or mekillot should be able to feed a *lot* of people for a *long* time, provided someone prepares the meat to keep it from rotting.

From there, things slowly progress towards more difficult.  A slight measure of finesse is required for organ harvesting that doesn't result in ruptures(cutting a stomach open is not a pleasant event).  Doing something like harvesting the venom gland from a snake's mouth though, would indeed be worthy of a feat of a well practiced skinner with some tricks up their sleeve. 

In short, I'd rather see meat, hides, and most organs be near trivial.  However, the quality of each could range greatly.  Meat isn't more or less nutritious based on value, but more tasty.  Hides, however, could be gated into crafting based on their quality.  And I suppose there's the stickler, to get it less silly and more grounded would require a whole subset of code around modified item values.

[Riev]

I feel that's even more of a push for the Crafting System to take over for the skinning script, actually. At that point, you have certain reasons you're skinning the corpse to begin with. Are you in it for the hide? For the meat? Are you looking to pull a gland from the snake's mouth?

It might make it too discrete, as nothing says you cant pull a snake gland AND get its skin as well, but maybe making it a bit more discrete would allow for less "waste"?

[Delirium]

Skin the corpse, get a skin object and a carcass.

Then butcher the carcass with the craft command for its various parts (meat, gland, bone, etc).

That way people only in it for the hide/shell/antler will leave a carcass behind.

Instead of a pile of ... stuff.

[TheGoose]

I like Delirium's idea best.

[chrisdcoulombe]

This would make a lot of sense.

[Kankfly]

While we're at it, can we leave some crime scene clues behind after we skin something? I'm not sure how messy skinning is, but I imagine it might be quite messy? If it isn't, then... maybe it can only be shown in 'hunt'.

>hunt
>Someone skinned a carcass here less than an hour ago.

[Kryos]

As a nitpick and note:  typically when you kill something, its really heavy to haul the whole thing back to wherever you're taking it.  You also don't typically take hides in the field, because you're inviting all sorts of big problems in so doing.  Both in the line of sanitation and predation upon you in turn.  You open the body up, take out all the guts, and bury/dispose of/ignore the ones you don't want, stash the ones you do, and then haul the might lighter body back.  Also helps avert post-death related organ problems.

[Riev]

Skin the corpse, get a skin object and a carcass.

Then butcher the carcass with the craft command for its various parts (meat, gland, bone, etc).

That way people only in it for the hide/shell/antler will leave a carcass behind.

Instead of a pile of ... stuff.

I thought something SIMILAR to this was sort of in the works, but even staff are only allowed to submit <x> number of crafts a week or a month or something. It was Akariel's whole deal.

[nauta]

1. I like the craft idea (craft into a carcass), etc. provided that (a) there is a delay, thus slowing hunters down a bit in the field, so you might think twice about skin-and-grab if you are in a dangerous area; and (b) the total amount of meat gathered from an animal is like 20% less than what it gives now, or, in other words, there's more chance to fail/partial fail even at master.

2. As to the points about realism, here's an idea to justify less meat from a cut (which I think is good for gameplay reasons): you just got done taking that thing out in the middle of a sandstorm with a bone club.  Perhaps the failure to gather the meat was because you splooshed the organ all over the whatever, ruining the meat; or some vulture snagged it while you were skinning; etc.

Here's a third idea:

3. Make skinning require an actual skinning knife, at least at master/advanced levels.  You shouldn't be able to make such clean cuts with a spear.

[Delirium]

who the heck is actually skinning stuff with a spear?

o.O

[chrisdcoulombe]

Obsidian is a really good skinning tool.  Sharp and makes work easy, not maybe as easy as steel, but not bad either.  If you got a lot more meat objects then we would have to change food to more like how you need it irl and make the animals more rare.  Boring...I do like the idea of making skinning more of an ordeal though.

[Riev]

Obsidian is a really good skinning tool.  Sharp and makes work easy, not maybe as easy as steel, but not bad either.  If you got a lot more meat objects then we would have to change food to more like how you need it irl and make the animals more rare.  Boring...I do like the idea of making skinning more of an ordeal though.

I... don't understand. Nobody in the thread so far as said they wanted more meat. Just to have "carcass" objects and "skinning" objects, so if you don't WANT the meat, you can leave the carcass aside, or if you're a butcher, just take the carcass for the meat.

[Molten Heart]

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[valeria]

If the problem is people leaving things lying around in the desert, I don't think nerfing skin is the way to go.

I remember back in the day where the problem was that animals didn't drop realistic amounts of anything. You could skin a whole bahamet and get a shell and a steak. I'd rather have skinned animals drop enough meat that someone can, if they want to, live off of hunting.

Not that I'd mind carcass items. Just that I would mind going back to animals dropping less stuff.

I think the problem is that people like roaming the desert killing things, or maybe they only want hides, so they just leave the horns and everything else lying around. Makes sense because a shop will only buy X number and those things are heavy. It doesn't make any sense in the game world, but it makes sense with the shop system.

My solution would be to have shops give diminishing returns instead of hard limits so people stop leaving things lying around in the desert. But I think I already posted in that thread a couple years back.

[nauta]

If the problem is people leaving things lying around in the desert, I don't think nerfing skin is the way to go.

It's partly this -- the clutter is a bit oocly jarring -- there was a time a few months ago when you'd rove the western Vrun and it'd just be piles and piles of chalton meat. 

But my motivation is more driven from an experience with a PC who was trying to RP being realistically hungry in a harsh desert world as a hunter, and so IC considerations would demand that she skin the angry things that tried to eat her, but then she'd just have all this meat that she'd end up junking on the sly, using things like: junk meat (as a vulture snags it).  (I'd see other hunters doing this too.)  I'd also try to avoid over-hunting the critters, but of course the angry ones can't easily be avoided, and fleeing all the time gets tiresome.  There are other RP ways of dealing with it (develop a distaste for scrab meat or gortok meat, for instance), but it just seemed that if you went out on a hunt in an IG day you'd bring back a lot more meat than you'd really need to, even without twinking.  (Most of my time was spent trying to get from point A to point B and not hunting.)

It isn't a big deal, but extrapolating from that, I think there are gameplay considerations (i.e., shouldn't it be harder to not starve than it currently is?).

Then again, it's just a single data point from a very specific character, which was the first grain of salt mentioned.  Other PCs and combinations might have different experiences.

Also, welcome back, hoot!

[valeria]

Thanks!  I admittedly haven't been a hunter in a while, but I have been a scavenger, and most of the piled stuff I saw wasn't meat but was horns, organs, etc etc.

Anyway, I think if shops bought more than X slabs of meat, people might bring it in more.  And I also think that while the vast majority of people in the cities are starving the vast majority of people in the cities aren't going out and hunting either.  These are just my personal thoughts of course.  I like having the higher food availability, since food now rots.  Though it does make sense that meat left lying in the open would rot more quickly.

[Riev]

I wonder if the City of Allanak would be interested in setting up a poopsmith-like code where you just sell them bags of meat for a pittance.

[Miradus]

I want to see quality added to items.

A tan strip of hide (superb)

Which would be used to make a better quality item than "a tan strip of hide (poor)".

[Molten Heart]

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[Riev]

There's a SIMILAR idea behind tools in the game, with qualities being attributed to certain tools, and I believe some crafts require a certain tool QUALITY.

I think it would be a massive undertaking to assign different quality levels to every material in game, though. I'd much rather think, for feasibility, that crafts start requiring tool quality.

Besides, are you then going to have a "poor" quality belt, and a "decent" quality belt? What would be the difference between the two?

[Molten Heart]

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[Riev]

Finished products like belts having a quality value seems like going to far. Having quality variations for raw materials that are otherwise pretty much all identical seems like a good idea. It'd be a lot of work, but it's still a good idea, one that would provide good results with the right implementation.

Currently all diamonds are the same, I don't think there is anything like low grade rubies, or high grade rubies. It'd be a way to make high grade craftables less coming because they'd require a higher quality of raw material which would be more rare.

Well, in that case, I think that'd require adding in new objects for the database, and creating/updating crafting recipes.

I mean, we have "a green stone" and "a polished green stone", and each one belongs in its own crafts.

If you had a craft that required a "high quality" scrab shell... I don't know. Why would you? What makes it high quality? Can it be a craft from an EXISTING scrab shell, where someone skilled in skinning or tanning can 'create' a high quality resource?

[Molten Heart]

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[valeria]

As the builder who went through every single tool in the game to assign a bunch of the preexisting tools a quality, I can tell you that it was time consuming and tedious.  I would volunteer again if staff needed that done again.  But we have a couple hundred tools and I'd guess around five to seven thousand craft component items, to put that in perspective. Every shell, every stone, every bone,  everywhere.  It would also require some coding, since quality is ONLY an attribute of tool-typed items, and changing all those items to tool items would screw up other aspects.  Ie, you can craft with a slingstone, but you can't sling a tool-typed stone.

Anyway, I'm not digging on the idea, just offering a perspective that it would be a MAJOR undertaking and would require at least some coding.

[Molten Heart]

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[Miradus]

Anyway, I'm not digging on the idea, just offering a perspective that it would be a MAJOR undertaking and would require at least some coding.

I get it. I know the base DIKU code and I've coded many muds from scratch. It's a HUGE undertaking both in value assignment and code rewrite.

That said, it'd still be cool.

[Riev]

I still think I'm more down for crafting a skinned scrab shell into a 'quality' scrab shell with a craft skill that checks skinning. If you fail, the shell wasn't good enough, but if you succeed, you manage to ... I don't know. Cut away any of the rougher, thinner looking areas to create a "lustrous chitinous shell" that now is included in all its own crafts.

It could be time consuming, but a Merchant PC could do all this themselves. Rather than assigning quality to every skinned object in the database, and then expect effects on crafted items.

[WithSprinkles]

I still think I'm more down for crafting a skinned scrab shell into a 'quality' scrab shell with a craft skill that checks skinning. If you fail, the shell wasn't good enough, but if you succeed, you manage to ... I don't know. Cut away any of the rougher, thinner looking areas to create a "lustrous chitinous shell" that now is included in all its own crafts.

It could be time consuming, but a Merchant PC could do all this themselves. Rather than assigning quality to every skinned object in the database, and then expect effects on crafted items.

Rather than hauling kills back to merchant PCs to butcher, processing top tier quality pelts and skins might have been an interesting thing for hunters employed by merchant houses to be able to do. Of course the merchants would still have to tan them, but... Maybe the expert skinning ability would have been something that could even have persisted if hunters left the house. More likely it would have been restricted to a certain way of cutting like "brew" is different than "craft" under the brew and so could be lost if someone bailed, but just tossing out that wild thought. It's moot now. (shrugs)

[Riev]

Its still a valid idea, but it wouldn't have given hunters the 'purpose' you'd think.

I'm still thinking +1 on carcass/resources off skinning, so you can bury the carcass whole if you want just the hide/claws...

If there's too much meat, I say chaltons don't need to drop as much meat as they do, or they should be FAR less aggressive to each other/far less numerous. Its expensive to eat in Allanak, hunters/grebbers provide sustenance at sustainable prices, but since a raw chalton steak and a cooked scrab steak are so similar, may as well eat the one you can get 6 of for no effort.

[Synthesis]

The underlying problem of "lots of junk items lying around" is the fact that these items are, indeed junk (most of the time).  If they were actually valuable (most of the time), they wouldn't be lying there.

[Doublepalli]

I think Skin is just fine as is. If you have master skinning you should be able to salvage most if not all of a corpse, meat included. Considering meat rots, and you have to eat it's really not so bad.

It becomes a problem when; you are in a clan and get free food.

[Hauwke]

Simple solution to that. Cook the food you cut and eat it or spread it around instead of the clan food. Its a thing I do on just about every character that is clanned because it makes sense to do.

Oh you have 15 scrab steaks? Spread the scrab steak love!

edit to add: You can even make a scene out of dinner or breakfast. Probably dinner because you have plenty of time for that, get your guy slaving over a hot oven and such.

[Yam]

This would have to go in with a buff to cooking to make it so advanced/master chefs still don't drop food in the dust 20+% of the time. Even so, I don't think this would be a very useful change. If you were so inclined you could still go spamhunt the Known. If you were a more restrained hunter, you'd HAVE to overhunt just to keep yourself fed (or make enough money to buy water, etc).

Bottom line, I think this would harm low-playtime players and wouldn't significantly impact high playtime players. It's already ridiculous enough that a moose-sized carru only yields two pieces of meat (which only fill up a PC for a day or two).

[Riev]

It's already ridiculous enough that a moose-sized carru only yields two pieces of meat (which only fill up a PC for a day or two).

This is absolutely not the case. Those two "pieces" of meat end up being enough for like 6 services, which should last you longer than a RL hour and a half.

However, I do agree with the rest of your sentiment. It wouldn't affect the high-playtime "Its morning I should kill ALL the things" people, but the "I have time to play for 2 hours tonight, and my PC can't afford 50 coins for a steak, so I guess a-hunting I will go" will struggle even more.

But I'm still totes behind carcass/skinnables

[Yam]

It's already ridiculous enough that a moose-sized carru only yields two pieces of meat (which only fill up a PC for a day or two).

This is absolutely not the case. Those two "pieces" of meat end up being enough for like 6 services, which should last you longer than a RL hour and a half.

Might be misremembering which animal, but some of the big ones definitely don't yield a sane amount of meat. It also depends on what you cook things into.

[Molten Heart]

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[Riev]

Akariel's MeatCraft project has definitely evened the playing field on a lot of the Northern animals.

I still would rather see skinning be a crafting check on a body in the room/in inventory, but I don't think crafting recipes can have two different outputs (I might be wrong on that). Maybe if skinning gave you a carcass with RELATIVE ease, but then horns/skulls/piles of bones are harder to get at? Or maybe have Carcass Object + a collection of body parts on the side, that THEN needs to be crafted?

[Synthesis]

Akariel's MeatCraft project has definitely evened the playing field on a lot of the Northern animals.

I still would rather see skinning be a crafting check on a body in the room/in inventory, but I don't think crafting recipes can have two different outputs (I might be wrong on that). Maybe if skinning gave you a carcass with RELATIVE ease, but then horns/skulls/piles of bones are harder to get at? Or maybe have Carcass Object + a collection of body parts on the side, that THEN needs to be crafted?

Crafting scrab guts yields 4 different objects, so obviously it's possible.

[Riev]

.... oh god you're right.

I'm so bad at this game.

[Akariel]

The problem with carcass objects is that it would take a literally decade to set everything up and get it approved. Not only would making a new carcass object for every creature be mind-numbingly boring, we can only put a certain amount of crafts up for approval at any one time. I would rather fill my craft tool with new, interesting objects than load it down with a ton of more complex ways to have very similar results (with a time delay) to skinning.

That said, I am all for putting a delay on the skin command and have tried to push for it before - and will push for it again.

[Yam]

The problem with carcass objects is that it would take a literally decade to set everything up and get it approved. Not only would making a new carcass object for every creature be mind-numbingly boring, we can only put a certain amount of crafts up for approval at any one time. I would rather fill my craft tool with new, interesting objects than load it down with a ton of more complex ways to have very similar results (with a time delay) to skinning.

That said, I am all for putting a delay on the skin command and have tried to push for it before - and will push for it again.

A sane delay would be great.

[Delirium]

The problem with carcass objects is that it would take a literally decade to set everything up and get it approved. Not only would making a new carcass object for every creature be mind-numbingly boring, we can only put a certain amount of crafts up for approval at any one time. I would rather fill my craft tool with new, interesting objects than load it down with a ton of more complex ways to have very similar results (with a time delay) to skinning.

That said, I am all for putting a delay on the skin command and have tried to push for it before - and will push for it again.

A sane delay would be great.

+1, but please make it a -pre- delay so that it can be interrupted if, say, a giant mekillot comes wandering in.

[Yam]

yuuuuuuuuuup

[TheGoose]

Could we maybe just not? Does everything have to take a fucking IRL hour? It takes long enough to get around.

[valeria]

In an ideal world, there would be a delay between each item you pull off the corpse that depends on what you're pulling off. Before, of course.

[Riev]

Could we maybe just not? Does everything have to take a fucking IRL hour? It takes long enough to get around.

Nothing stops you from packing the corpse beforehand, and doing it later, either.

And it doesn't have to be longer than 10-15 seconds. Its just that you can go in and skin corpse x10 in under five seconds, which is pretty ridiculous.

[Molten Heart]

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[Akariel]

Mekillot, Bahamet, and Salt Worms all currently use a system like what y'all described. I'm happy to do that sort of thing (with carcasses) with big creatures, but making new code just to make a system more complex and time consuming - then leave the same end result seems wasteful when we could have our limited coding resources working on better, more interesting things.

But delays, I like those.

[Bushranger]

Unfortunately I can see some people doing something like this to 'practice' their skinning skill if the carcass system is implemented without delays:

Skin Scrab;get carcass;emote rips ~carcus up with a flurry of knife strikes;craft carcass into #1;drop all;say -shrugging Whatever, let's go.

I do like the idea of a delay but is it possible to tailor the delay to the size of the body being skinned?I like the idea of a vestric being plucked and dressed quicker than it takes to skin and butcher a carru.

[Synthesis]

I think putting a delay on skin would really be kind of pointless, but it's probably easy enough to implement, so...whatever.

Any hunter PC worth a damn will rest their mount, then sit and change ldesc to recover stamina while emoting skinning the foo.  I've never seen anyone bombing around the desert wrecking shit and skinning it, except in the fairly rare case where you NEED to get X, Y, or Z, but you also NEED to log out soon.

[650Booger]

a question related to this topic, I think.  I've noticed meat items disappear from my inventory occasionally if they are uncooked.  not spoiled, just vanished.  is this intended?

[Bushranger]

a question related to this topic, I think.  I've noticed meat items disappear from my inventory occasionally if they are uncooked.  not spoiled, just vanished.  is this intended?

[650Booger]

  thank you, I literally lol'd

[Vox]

Skin the corpse, get a skin object and a carcass.

Then butcher the carcass with the craft command for its various parts (meat, gland, bone, etc).

That way people only in it for the hide/shell/antler will leave a carcass behind.

Instead of a pile of ... stuff.

I love this.