New Feature! - Room Mechanic - Barbecuing

[Rasmus]

Barbecuing

A new building has been introduced to the cookery room, the barbeque.

[IMG]replace_photbucket_link/Barbeque.png[/IMG]

The idea here is that we are going to give the food chain some more depth. As you may have seen in previous news the mice has been introduced to the game. These mice will work not only as a building material for the mill in the farm room but also as food source if necessary. Once the barbeque has been built the workers will put alive mice (that is why they are tied up as seen in the screenshot) on the barbeque, and once they have been roasted enough we will have a "roasted mouse" as a new item, which can be eaten...

The fish is no longer consumable either, now you will have to barbecue it as well before your creatures will eat it.

[IMG]replace_photbucket_link/RoastedFish.png[/IMG]

Next up I will fix so that certain creatures will prioritize certain food, they will still eat all the food but they will be more efficient if they get their favourite food. In this way the player will be wise to get as much food variety as possible.

What do you think?

[Mello Tonin]

Yes to all of the above. I think though that it should be powered by either coal, or you increase the amount of wood available at the start because wood gets used for so many things you can start running into problems having enough early in the game.

[Rasmus]

Hmm, yeah. I am a little bit in a dilemma about that. The options are:
- Either use wood or coal (workers takes whatever is the closest) for heating up baking table, iron smelter and barbeque.
- Or use only wood for all heating up, this means that the coal will be put in the iron smelter with the iron and the wood below instead of the coal. This would be more realistic as well.

The last option means that we only focus on having enough wood for burning stuff and not involving coal with it. It may be a little more straight forward and easier to manage.

[UfoL]

I think that problem was faced in several games. The Settlers or Minecraft for example. Both offer a way to burn wood into charcoal. In minecraft you can burn wood, but if you make it into charcoal it can burn twice as long. But both need renewable source of wood.

Coal and charcoal can easily equal each other 1 to 1. I think there isn't even need to ditinguish each other. Coal as a high grade fuel must be used in smeltery and smithy. Food however does not need so much heat and can be fueled both by wood and coal. Difference would be that coal lasts twice as long as mere wood. Of course production of charcoal would be slow and require workforce, so mining rock coal should still be more profitable.

As i said renewable source of fuel i needed, otherwise most fuel consumig devices would just become dead decorations.
There is several ways to make it renewable:
- Natural, slow regrowth of roots or trees in overworld.
- Manual replanting of forets. (or semi automated by imps)
- using spell, or fertilizer made of glowing mushrooms you presented recently.

To decide which fuel cookery uses player could just juse right click menu, the same way one can disable/enable production of bread or beer. Once you click coal icon, you ban room from using it and it switches to wood. Else it would prioritize coal as a more efficient fuel.

[Rasmus]

Making wood into charcoal to make it last longer would just push the problem forward. I have made it so that wood is the only burning source, so we can focus on making wood renewable I think. This could be made bu forcing the player to raid the surface or in some other way. But atm the wood lasts a long long time so I don't think this is an urgent issue, but definitely something that needs to be handled in the future.

[Sebt]

IMO wood in underworld should be quite a rare item, but coal quite abundant and because of that relation I would see coal as the main fuel resource when wood could be used more for decoration or furnishing purpose (chairs, tables).

[Mello Tonin]

You make a very good point Sebt

[Rasmus]

Hmm, what if...
We removed wood from the construction, and wood as a burning material, and the root veins. Then only being able to get wood from above ground?
This could work, but we need to change some textures I suppose, for example the bar room is primarily made in wood, so is the storage room etc. Another material out there that could replace the wood in appearance when built and that can also be mined below ground?

[Xaos]

From the internet:
Materials found naturally underground:

metals: Aluminium, Chromium, Copper, Mercury, Tin, Titanium, Tungsten, Uranium, Nickel, Beryllium, Lead, Gold, Iron Ore, Lithium, Magnesium, Niobium, Palladium, Silver, Tantalum, Vanadium, Zinc

Minerals: Almandine, Asbestos, Bentonite, Boron, Coal, Graphite, Kaolin, Limestone, Oil Sands, Salt, Trona, Vermiculite, Zeolite, Mica, Sulfur

Precious Stones: Amethyst, Aquamarine, Diamond, Emerald, Opal, Peridot, Ruby, Sapphire, Spinel

Quarry Stone: Marble, Granite

Dimension Stone: Alabaster, Gypsum, Soapstone, Talc

Others: Petroleum, Natural Gas, Clay, Rock Salt, Potash, Gravel, Water, Oil Shale

Something here has got to work

[Mello Tonin]

Yeah I think your only options for building material underground are metals, stone, or clay but I don't think we want to go back to having dirt as a material again, and clay would just blend in to the regular ground textures so stone or metal it is.

[Sebt]

Hehe, I feel like we came back to discussion whether we should have any plant farm in underworld (because of no light coming from surface) or there shouldn't be anything related to surface agricultural methods, so the same may have matter for any other underworld structures made from surface materials.

I think roots could be still in underworld, but not growing deeper then 2 top blocks and be so rare that it should force player to search for roots on the surface world and rather serve as an alternative for other construction materials - it may require to give player an alternative for him to build wood storage constructions or based on underworld materials, even wood could still be the fuel for some furnaces, but that may require player to choose if he wants wood or coal or balanced mix of them being used to fuel furnaces - so that may or not complicate micromanaging, unless player could set the limit of how much fuel resources could be burned no more than certain number of them. Anyway making that everything in underworld is based on its own resources sounds logic, natural.

[simrobert2001]

Hehe, I feel like we came back to discussion whether we should have any plant farm in underworld (because of no light coming from surface) or there shouldn't be anything related to surface agricultural methods, so the same may have matter for any other underworld structures made from surface materials.

I think roots could be still in underworld, but not growing deeper then 2 top blocks and be so rare that it should force player to search for roots on the surface world and rather serve as an alternative for other construction materials - it may require to give player an alternative for him to build wood storage constructions or based on underworld materials, even wood could still be the fuel for some furnaces, but that may require player to choose if he wants wood or coal or balanced mix of them being used to fuel furnaces - so that may or not complicate micromanaging, unless player could set the limit of how much fuel resources could be burned no more than certain number of them. Anyway making that everything in underworld is based on its own resources sounds logic, natural.

I know I may be a bit late on this, but, perhaps something like "ORcs are happier with wood grilled salmon. Imps are happy with anything. Minotaur prefer coal baked bread."
Or, even then, "Coal baked items give 10% happiness. Wood grilled gives 20%" Something to make us choose whether or not to use our precious wood. As for the surface, there needs to be something else to bring us there. That is awhile down the road, I know that.

[Rasmus]

I like the idea but I think it could be messy with so many varieties of the same item type, I think different kind of food is to prefer in this case as it gives more clarity for the player. Of course I don't rule it out, as you said: "It is awhile down the road.".

[simrobert2001]

I like the idea but I think it could be messy with so many varieties of the same item type, I think different kind of food is to prefer in this case as it gives more clarity for the player. Of course I don't rule it out, as you said: "It is awhile down the road.".

Or, even then just a flat rate bonus, for now.

[Mello Tonin]

I wanted to bump this one because I was thinking about having an unlimited run Sandbox game where you could potentially continuously allow portal spawns to test your dungeon's defense, or have a manual lever to start a spawn as in DK. The problem with being able to do this now as it relates to BBQ and Baking is that Wood is a finite resource. To trade for it also requires a finite resource Stone (although it's quite abundant at the moment), or Bread which I don't think you could make in enough quantity to both feed and trade especially if you have several BBQ pits going too. Right now you can get Coal by trading Bones, so as long as you keep killin, you will have enough fuel. Just figured I'd throw that out into the mix.