Cook NPCs - Good or bad?

[Trenidor]

after going on a short vacation, I've come of with a good idea for this:

Make the PC recruits make the meals. In the army, this is popular, even famous for the fact that New Recruits are put on Cooking Duty to peal potatos all day long...

You could mix it up a little, since recruits aren't always online to make a steady schedule, and assign them to prepair food and get out of practice.

Another thing I'd have to add would be change the cooks into inventorists. Let me explain: Follow AC's #2 plan in that anyone can drop off the meat and other raw materials off to the NPC. Only instead of prepairing the food, they put it in storage and keep track of the items. After X amount of days, the food goes rotten. These raw materials could be accessed by the house servant, the cheif, and whoever is assigned on cooking duty (give them a key to the locked storage room with the NPC in it) This way, those Byn Mercinaries will really become mercinaries when they can cook, clean, and beat someone's ass. The Inventoriest will only take raw materials, cuz cooked ones are harder to store.

It'd solve a few problems.

When there isn't any food in the Store Room (goes rotten or someone takes the last bit) the next person to enter the store house, or the person that takes the last piece of food, will recive a simple message like: "Go tell your searge we're all done outta food here in the storehouse." The recruit will contact the seargeant and tell him/her the bad news. The seargeant will go get into the secret stash of food buying supplies and get some money out to give the recruit to buy supplies. After that, more supplies will be orderd from some source (The next town over).

On Saturdays, since the system goes down and resets the shops and what not, this would work out perfect because the storehouse could be restocked from the only VNPC caravan shipment.

[Forest Junkie]

As a lone hunter, I've become overburdened with so much food that I have to waste meat from my kills.  And I see meat and stuff lying around outside all the time.  This has to stop.

There is a simple solution to your "problem": stop hunting when you have enough meat.

[Bestatte]

Forest Junkie has a very valid point.

What are the realistic explanations for why people hunt?

1) For food
2) For body parts to make crafted items or to sell
3) For self-defense if they are attacked by an aggro critter

If you already have food, cross off #1.
If you've got all that food, then chances are you probably also have a packful of skins, hides, shells, beaks, sinew, feathers, and whatever the fuck else. Cross off #2.
If you have all the food and skins and everything else you need, you should be heading back home (wherever home happens to be) or pitching tent to camp out for the night so you can prepare to head home in the morning. So, really, the only reason after you've exhausted #1 and #2 is to keep yourself alive on the way home.

Assuming you know how to use the FLEE command, know your way around wherever you're hunting, and know how to type RUN, you should be able to reduce the need to stay alive to a bare minimum.

Summary: Under extremely rare circumstances, there is no reason to hunt once you already have the things you went out to hunt for in the first place.

OOC reason to hunt: Practice to boost your skills if your clan doesn't have training, or if you are unclanned.

A very real need, and a very understandable need. But I would submit this: If you have all that food, and all those skins, it's time to go home. You've had enough practice for the RL day.

[Anonymous]

I just can't imagine a situation where anything but the foulest of food items were left behind.  This isn't the great American frontier where people had all the food they wanted, so they could just take the skins and not give a damn.

To me your average hunter wouldn't be willing to risk leaving behind 5-10 sids worth of meat that s/he knows there's a market for just on the off-chance they might be able to get another jozhal skin.

[Armaddict]

Someone said something about how salting and preserving food would keep it from spoilning, and otherwise, food would have a delay before it was useless, and it was responded that it would make life as a noble or merchant guard or whatever 'too much easier' than the independent hunter.

Anyone else think this is completely logical and makes perfect sense?

A noble guard -does- have benefits over an independent hunter, man!  Otherwise, people wouldn't sign their lives over to these people.

And it's late.  That's all I'm putting down right now.

[Angela Christine]

Would you even need salt to dry meat in most of the known world?  Salt is used to deal with moisture, because moisture encourages rotting, but the known world is extremely arid.  This isn't like salting fish on the sea shore, next to a gigantic sea full of water, with bouts of water falling from the sky.  Just leaving the meat on a rock or a spear in the sun for a few hours ought to dry it out quite nicely.  The inner layers of a large carcass might have time to rot since the outer layers would prevent the moisture from escaping too quickly, but unprotected hunks of meat should dry out quickly.  Unless you do something stupid like put a bunch of wet meat in a moisture-proof hide bag for a few days, then you're going to get some interesting rotting and a really special smell when you open the bag.  

I think the natural tendancy would be for most food to dry out, not rot.  If it did rot, they would probably eat it anyway, because that green fuzzy stuff is the closest some of them ever get to a vegetable.  

If you are going to stick a timer on raw meat, have it turn into "a small dried out hunk of meat" when the timer expires.  This could be a generic result for all/most meat, like the burned mass of meat, so that no one would have to write up a bunch of new objects.  Dried out meat would have a moisture content of zero, and would probably have the effect of making you a little more thirsty when you ate it, because your body would need to re-hydrate the meat to digest it.  It would also have limited craftability, compared to fresh meat, because you simply can't make a juicy steak from a hunk of dehydrated meat (you can add water and vegetables to make a nice stew, but not a steak).  It would be slightly less valuable than fresh meat, but not quite as worthless as burned meat.


Angela Christine

[EvilRoeSlade]

Angela Christine.  I applaud your ingenuity.