Topic

Energy/Mood Balance

I think all food items should immediately have an energy gain upon collection, unless it also gives another benefit, such as mood, etc. If I harvest a tree with 3 cherries and it costs me 5 energy, I want to get at least 6 energy back from eating them, immediately. No food should cost more energy to acquire than it gives when eaten, even if the food is totally raw. Each step of processing should exponentially increase the energy profit. There should always be an immediate energy or mood profit when you harvest any food. 

Petting and feeding/watering should increase your mood +1. This can also encourage people to love on things they aren't about to harvest.

Also, it seems like mood and energy go down too much without really doing anything at all but learning. I think the rate of energy/mood loss that is not tied to various activities should be lessened. 

Posted 18 months ago by Purple Haze Subscriber! | Permalink

Replies

  • When you get higher level, you see that the energy does end up balancing out. Even now I'm not really high level and I'm starting to never have energy problems, and when I do I know enough recipes to make food that I can just whip something up to help. If they made it so harvesting didn't cost any energy to do, or cooking, no one would ever really run out of energy, would they?
    Posted 18 months ago by Milx Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I think in my original writing I was mentioning it being a problem for newer players, but somehow that got left out of my post. Yes, as you go up in skill (and money), this becomes less of a problem. You shouldn't have to get to a high level before you can balance energy adequately though. Harvest cherries, lose 5 energy, get 3 if you eat them. Many items are like this, so that you don't gain energy profit until you use them in a recipe, and many recipes are very energy intensive. So yes, in the end, you have balance, but in the beginning, you don't, and that's the problem. I am trying to say you should start off with a balance, because many, especially low level and new players.. don't have the luxury of doing all this extra stuff with their food because theyre already too low on energy by the time they collect it.

    As far as running out of energy, if you are making food with the intent to sell, it's going to cost you energy. As far as both collecting making food to eat, it should never cost you more energy than you get.. what would be the point? Recipes just increase the amount of energy you get in the end, after you use the recipe.. ie, after you use the energy (that you might not have). The whole concept of food is to gain energy, so you can do something other than make food and eat it?
    Posted 18 months ago by Purple Haze Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I get 6 cherries every harvest.
    Posted 18 months ago by daniel5457 Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Since the game is closed at the moment, I can't really corroborate it, but might I have harvested a less mature tree? 
    Posted 18 months ago by Purple Haze Subscriber! | Permalink
  • The amount of your harvest is directly linked to the amount of skill you have. Additional levels of skills grant extra bonuses like - a higher base harvest, lower energy costs per action, sometimes cool other skills, and most especially... a higher chance at bonuses. There are two real 'bonus' types... the 'prize' reward of stuff (music, drinks, gems) and a second 'bonus' of the Super-Harvest when working with plants and animals.
    *For reference: With a finished skill table I get 12 cherries per harvest, 2 harvests per tree per day + a Super Harvest somewhere around every third tree.

    The energy drain while stationary is ~0.8% energy capacity per 90 seconds, or roughly 16% per hour. The % stays consistent throughout your life. If you logged in at full health and stood around doing absolutely nothing, it *should* take you about 6 hours 15 minutes of real-world time to die. A Glitch day is 4 hours of real-world time.

    I don't see how increasing the energy on raw tree-food helps things. From what I can see... there's only a handful of cooked dishes providing more energy per stack than eggs, and the energy per grown veggies far outstrips the energy put into growing them.
    Posted 18 months ago by Travinara Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I'm curious about milx's comment about cooking. In other threads, I'd gotten the impression that most cooked foods take more energy to make than you get back in energy increase.

    What do you cook to replenish your energy effectively?
    Posted 18 months ago by magic panda Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Yes, I have had a huge problem, being a newb at the lower levels.. Trying to find the things that give more energy than they cost.. And no newbie knows the rate per hour of energy expenditure, and doesn't afk with a full energy load. Not all newbs can make all recipes either. All I'm arguing for is net energy gain at every level, when it comes to food
    Posted 18 months ago by Purple Haze Subscriber! | Permalink
  • @SourGrapes - I understand the intent, I think you miss my point. You're comparing bananas to grapes. Harvesting and Cooking are two separate skill sets, but you're asking the rewards for A to be equal to B. Because of the link - changing A will have an exponential increase on B.

    @magic panda - I'm working on revised math for some of that in between forum posts (the things I do with my days off). There were pretty big changes in energy costs to make a dish, energy provided by a dish, and backpack stack sizes.

    Part of the problem in all this is... end-to-end costs of food vary depending on skill sets. Someone with Gardening 5 and virtually no Cooking is going to have a better benefit from a cooked dish than someone with lots of Cooking and no plant skills - producing 3 distinct sub-specialties until the skills even out (Gardeners, Cooks, and Harvesters). Each can/will benefit from each other, but can survive without them.

    What goes on with trees is no different than what goes on with AK in the lower levels. With AK1 you can pet/nibble at a combined energy cost of 8, to receive 1 meat = gain of 2 energy... if the pig happens to be hungry and needs fed, there goes a meat and you've got a loss. 

    The answer to both problems is the same, learn more skills. I blame everyone insisting Mining is the only way to earn money for some of these perceptions. People get mining before they have the means to feed themselves and then have a really rough time of things.
    Posted 18 months ago by Travinara Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I'm not asking for the raw product freshly harvested to be the same as a finished product in gains. I'm asking for there to simply be a gain at all levels, but a much larger gain the better you are and further your recipe... Everyone at every level should be able to self sustain
    Posted 18 months ago by Purple Haze Subscriber! | Permalink
  • @SG - you can... Cherries/Beans x3 may cost 5 energy now and only give 3 energy... but eggs give Eggs x3 costs 5 energy and give 15... a better return than you can get with AK until after AK2.

    LGT1 is 10 min, LGT2 is 1 hour, and LGT3 is a little over 2 = less than a Glitch day to learn all three.. minimizing energy cost and maximizing tree harvests. If trees are your thing, it's not a rough path if you can get your hands on an Emblem of Grendaline to unlock the third level. Even the second level cuts the energy cost and increases the benefit.
    Posted 18 months ago by Travinara Subscriber! | Permalink
  • You can self-sustain at low levels, you just have to watch what you do.  For example, a pet/nibble on a pig with no skills nets you 1 energy profit.  It's not much, but leveling happens *very* quickly at lower levels, which means frequent full refills.  Combine that with the frequent quests, which also almost all give energy at lower levels, and it's quite easy to keep things going until a couple of skills are learned (remember too that most skills take far less than an hour when you're early in the chart and haven't learned much).
    Posted 18 months ago by Magic Monkey Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Then why dont we drop newbies next to egg trees and let them know what the deal is? A rational noob assumption is low energy, collect food. Are you arguing that everyone should first become a gardener or chef in order to maintain? That not being my thing, I had opted for the animal route, not realizing how measly the gains once you add in feeding.
    Posted 18 months ago by Purple Haze Subscriber! | Permalink
  • The game does just fine as far as getting players at least one basic skill so you can self-sustain. When you start the game your skill options are: AK1, EZ Cooking 1, LGT1, and SA1. Only SA doesn't lead to a path of self-sustaining. 
    Posted 18 months ago by Travinara Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Perhaps I should insert foot in mouth. After all, I only started playing on the 10th, therefore my issues and observations ate rather naive and irrelevant to overall playability. My apologies.
    Posted 18 months ago by Purple Haze Subscriber! | Permalink
  • FWIW, @SourGrapes, I had the same initial reaction to energy levels. For example, as a new player, I assumed that gathering cherries (or even squeezing chickens for grain) would yield food that was net positive, until I took a careful look at all the numbers that the game was throwing at me.

    Now that I'm past the very early levels, my energy maintenance is easier. If I had it to do over again, I would have bought a house with a garden earlier instead of bags, which were just expensive enough to keep me poor, and just necessary enough because I kept filling my inventory.
    Posted 18 months ago by magic panda Subscriber! | Permalink