Meat Types and Inventory Management

[ufologan]

This suggestion comes in four semi-unrelated parts.

1. I think the Jerky and Roast item families should be consolidated into a single item each: a Jerky and a Roast. Having different items for each bug's raw meat makes some sense, if only for realism and lore reasons, but once it becomes food, I don't see any real difference between one and the other. Maybe the Aphid and Tadpole could keep their unique ones, representative of the former being tiny and the latter being large, but what's the difference between a Weevil Roast and a Grub Roast, from a gameplay perspective? Why do I need a stack of 5 Aphid Jerky, a stack of 3 Weevil Jerky, and a stack of 2 Gnat Jerky, all taking up 10% of my inventory, when I could just have one stack of 10 Jerky that does the same job with less fuss?
    
2. This one is a minor annoyance and I can understand why it might not happen, but I would love it if the hotbar was a separate inventory space from the main inventory? I'm constantly having to rearrange my carefully-managed inventory because, for example, I equip my hammer from slot 2 of my hotbar to harvest some quartzite, and then when I unequip the hammer, it doesn't go back where it was because that slot freed up when I equipped the axe & is now full of rocks. I like to know where everything is instead of having to spend time searching for something i would've sworn was here somewhere, maybe it's in a chest, (nope it was in my inventory all along but I missed it because it wasn't where I expected and now I've wasted two minutes on boring inventory fiddling instead of actually playing the game), yknow? Make the hotbar a toolbelt, and this problem goes away (mostly, at least), because the tools I'm regularly equipping and unequipping get their own dedicated spots, instead of having to get shuffled around all the time.
    
3. I'm sure this one has been said before, but: inventory upgrades? Pretty please? 30 is a respectable amount of slots, but I'd give my whole stash of silk rope for an upgraded backpack with an extra 10 slots! (Also, I'd like to quickly note that suggestion #2 would pretty much solve this problem, because suddenly I'd have 8 inventory slots that weren't used up by my normal tools and weapons!)
    
4. Maybe this is already a thing and I just didn't notice, but a sentence in the description of the bow saying "press L to change arrows" or something would be helpful. I honestly didn't initially notice the little thing in the bottom-right corner saying as much, because I'm so used to that bit of UI being largely the same for every tool, so It didn't occur to me to check it when I got the bow. I might be in the minority here, though. I dunno.

Anyway, thanks for your time!!

[Btveron]

I'm wondering if the various roasts and jerkys provided different amounts of hunger restoration or, in the case of the roasts, have different timers for how long before they spoil. If not then I don't see why anyone would do anything other than drop a stack of mushrooms by the baseball and just wait for the weevil hoard to show up. I got 18 raw weevil meat in about 5 minutes earlier today that I turned into jerky so I'm set for a while.

Glad to know that I'm not the only one that gets annoyed by the inventory shuffling from equipping and unequipping stuff via the hotbar. I try to keep all my tools in the top left, and my food, canteens, and smoothies in the bottom right but then they get all jumbled up. Inventory management is a little clunky right now. Not intolerable, but I do hope they streamline it a little.

I also love the idea of a craftable backpack upgrade. Maybe once more of the storyline is fleshed out they can tie unlocking the recipe to a quest or another BURGL chip. Something that you have to work for.

[ScritchOwl]

I say you should be able to use jerky in the same way you could the raw meats.

 

Examples

aphid shoes should be able to be dried aphids. I mean are you putting your foot into a flesh aphid each time. 

Weevil shields would begin decaying if you use those flesh chunks

Smoothies should be the same.  Let a person stock those water fleas as jerky for swimming and waterbreathing

 

[ufologan]

7 hours ago, Btveron said:

I'm wondering if the various roasts and jerkys provided different amounts of hunger restoration or, in the case of the roasts, have different timers for how long before they spoil. If not then I don't see why anyone would do anything other than drop a stack of mushrooms by the baseball and just wait for the weevil hoard to show up. I got 18 raw weevil meat in about 5 minutes earlier today that I turned into jerky so I'm set for a while.

Glad to know that I'm not the only one that gets annoyed by the inventory shuffling from equipping and unequipping stuff via the hotbar. I try to keep all my tools in the top left, and my food, canteens, and smoothies in the bottom right but then they get all jumbled up. Inventory management is a little clunky right now. Not intolerable, but I do hope they streamline it a little.

I also love the idea of a craftable backpack upgrade. Maybe once more of the storyline is fleshed out they can tie unlocking the recipe to a quest or another BURGL chip. Something that you have to work for.

Now that you mention it, I'm not sure if there's a difference in restoration/spoil time. If there is, it's minor enough that I've never noticed at all. As for mushrooms and weevils, honestly I probably won't do that simply because I find it more fun to go hunting, and hunting is easy enough that finding an even lower-effort solution feels less enjoyable to me than doing it the slow(ish), dirty way. BUT I get that different people enjoy different things, and if someone finds hunting tedious, more power to 'em for finding quicker way. Personally I've never seen the point in gamedevs (in general, not Obsidian) trying to problem-solve away every possible shortcut to guarantee their "intended experience". Not everyone will get the same thing from every game, and just because one person wants to skip over a particular part of gameplay doesn't mean it's a bad piece of gameplay, it just means you can't account for taste xD But I'll get off my soapbox, lol

To your latter two paragraphs: ABSOLUTELY! If they could make a recipe for a bigger backpack & have it unlock via BURGL, that would be so cool! And I'm glad I'm not alone on the shuffling thing. I keep my tools in the top bar, food and spare equipment in the second, and whatever goodies I get from foraging/hunting in the third. Even just being able to lock my tools to a specific inventory slot would be spectacular!

[TheDocCroc]

On 8/26/2021 at 8:08 PM, ufologan said:

This suggestion comes in four semi-unrelated parts.

1. I think the Jerky and Roast item families should be consolidated into a single item each: a Jerky and a Roast. Having different items for each bug's raw meat makes some sense, if only for realism and lore reasons, but once it becomes food, I don't see any real difference between one and the other. Maybe the Aphid and Tadpole could keep their unique ones, representative of the former being tiny and the latter being large, but what's the difference between a Weevil Roast and a Grub Roast, from a gameplay perspective? Why do I need a stack of 5 Aphid Jerky, a stack of 3 Weevil Jerky, and a stack of 2 Gnat Jerky, all taking up 10% of my inventory, when I could just have one stack of 10 Jerky that does the same job with less fuss?
    
2. This one is a minor annoyance and I can understand why it might not happen, but I would love it if the hotbar was a separate inventory space from the main inventory? I'm constantly having to rearrange my carefully-managed inventory because, for example, I equip my hammer from slot 2 of my hotbar to harvest some quartzite, and then when I unequip the hammer, it doesn't go back where it was because that slot freed up when I equipped the axe & is now full of rocks. I like to know where everything is instead of having to spend time searching for something i would've sworn was here somewhere, maybe it's in a chest, (nope it was in my inventory all along but I missed it because it wasn't where I expected and now I've wasted two minutes on boring inventory fiddling instead of actually playing the game), yknow? Make the hotbar a toolbelt, and this problem goes away (mostly, at least), because the tools I'm regularly equipping and unequipping get their own dedicated spots, instead of having to get shuffled around all the time.
    
3. I'm sure this one has been said before, but: inventory upgrades? Pretty please? 30 is a respectable amount of slots, but I'd give my whole stash of silk rope for an upgraded backpack with an extra 10 slots! (Also, I'd like to quickly note that suggestion #2 would pretty much solve this problem, because suddenly I'd have 8 inventory slots that weren't used up by my normal tools and weapons!)
    
4. Maybe this is already a thing and I just didn't notice, but a sentence in the description of the bow saying "press L to change arrows" or something would be helpful. I honestly didn't initially notice the little thing in the bottom-right corner saying as much, because I'm so used to that bit of UI being largely the same for every tool, so It didn't occur to me to check it when I got the bow. I might be in the minority here, though. I dunno.

Anyway, thanks for your time!!

For your #2, I think a belt slot would be perfect. 

Have the default hotbar be 4 slots, but aside from the main inventory. Meaning you need to craft better toolbelts throughout the game to get more slots, a tier 1 with +2 and a tier 2 with +4 slots added to the "hotbar".

Also if there's ever a new boss added, the parts for it could be used to make a tier 3 belt that adds +6, for a total of 10 toolbelt slots, and 30 normal inventory slots.