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?