"Ruined" Food, Fishing Tackle, Whetstones, etc

[Wasteland Watcher]

They now stay in your inventory. What to do with this junk?

We can't recycle?

 

Also, stuck the ruined fishing tackle in a drawer, closed it, reopened it, fishing tackle gone 

Feature? Bug?

[cekivi]

Other people have noticed this with used flares. No official word yet on whether this is a bug or feature.

[Wasteland Watcher]

 Used flares I would sometimes used as "markers" to kind of mark certain points on maps I am unfamiliar with. 

 I suppose I could use the other junk for that as well though it would be interesting if I marked an area with, for example a ruined candy bar, and then a new patch made the ruined item deteriorate away, erasing my marker 

[Scyzara]

I can confirm that not only burnt-up flares continue to exist, but also various other used-up or expired items (e.g. sewing kits, whetstones, bows, expired food and sodas). They can neither be harvested nor destroyed nor do they have any use (yet). Maybe 0% condition meat can be used as a decoy, haven't tried that yet.^^

I've built a garbage heap behind my base where I collect all the trash, but I don't particularly like the new mechanics to be honest.

Another thing is I'm starting to stumble across more and more 0% food and soda cans while exploring the maps now. (I'm on day 125 and have explored 2.5 maps so far - currently working on some "stocktaking" project, thus I take my time and explore everything extremely thoroughly). At least 1/3 of the food I come across on day 125 has already rotten away and another third is somewhere below 30% condition. I don't mind that much, just found it a bit odd as I had thought the expiration date timers were set to 1000 days (=3 years) and not 3 months.

If things continue to deteriorate at this rate, I'll probably find nothing but expired food on the last map around day 200. Well, I'll write a comment about that once I'm done with my project and know for sure.

[Wasteland Watcher]

13 minutes ago, Scyzara said:

I can confirm that not only burnt-up flares continue to exist, but also various other used-up or expired items (e.g. sewing kits, whetstones, bows, expired food and sodas). They can neither be harvested nor destroyed nor do they have any use (yet). Maybe 0% condition meat can be used as a decoy, haven't tried that yet.^^

I've built a garbage heap behind my base where I collect all the trash, but I don't particularly like the new mechanics to be honest.

Another thing is I'm starting to stumble across more and more 0% food and soda cans while exploring the maps now. (I'm on day 125 and have explored 2.5 maps so far - currently working on some "stocktaking" project, thus I take my time and explore everything extremely thoroughly). At least 1/3 of the food I come across on day 125 has already rotten away and another third is somewhere below 30% condition. I don't mind that much, just found it a bit odd as I had thought the expiration date timers were set to 1000 days (=3 years) and not 3 months.

If things continue to deteriorate at this rate, I'll probably find nothing but expired food on the last map around day 200. Well, I'll write a comment about that once I'm done with my project and know for sure.

 Speaking of that weird expired food, I've also found 0% food items and it troubles me that they are still listed as food. 

It would be more correct to either have 0% food items despawn or even better, have them replaced with items such as "moldy, rusty can" (same for soda can), moldy box, mold encrusted candy wrapper and their category changed to same "miscellaneous" category that wood and scrap metal are in (with no greyed out "eat" button).

I'm also concerned how at 180 days I'm finding some 0% food (having only cleared out ML & CH so far).

I'm inclined to think I'd better bring snares (and 6 kg venison) with me when I move to a new area 

[Hotzn]

59 minutes ago, Scyzara said:

I can confirm that not only burnt-up flares continue to exist, but also various other used-up or expired items (e.g. sewing kits, whetstones, bows, expired food and sodas). They can neither be harvested nor destroyed nor do they have any use (yet). Maybe 0% condition meat can be used as a decoy, haven't tried that yet.^^

I've built a garbage heap behind my base where I collect all the trash, but I don't particularly like the new mechanics to be honest.

Another thing is I'm starting to stumble across more and more 0% food and soda cans while exploring the maps now. (I'm on day 125 and have explored 2.5 maps so far - currently working on some "stocktaking" project, thus I take my time and explore everything extremely thoroughly). At least 1/3 of the food I come across on day 125 has already rotten away and another third is somewhere below 30% condition. I don't mind that much, just found it a bit odd as I had thought the expiration date timers were set to 1000 days (=3 years) and not 3 months.

If things continue to deteriorate at this rate, I'll probably find nothing but expired food on the last map around day 200. Well, I'll write a comment about that once I'm done with my project and know for sure.

You may want to try and put some of your garbage in a container, close it and open it again. Fair chance the item will disappear. It works with the flare and the whetstone, and I presume it will work with a number of other items. LTD scientists are asked to step forward and verify Hotzn's bold hypothesis in the field.

The fact that you are encountering a lot of fully decayed food items on day 125 could be related to the new accelerated indoor rotting, could it not? Because you find most of the prefabricated food indoors. If this were so, how could it be remedied? By introducing more complex indoor temperature mechanics. For example: Let's assume a certain cabin has an indoor temperature of -3°C. Food items stored indoors should then decay at the same rate as outside. Now if the player lights a fire in the cabin's stove, inside temperature should go up by, let's say, 1°C per hour the fire is burning until a certain "ceiling" is reached (let's assume for this particular cabin it's a max of +5°C. So 8 hours of fire would heat up the indoor temperature to +5°C. And when the fire goes out, the inside temperature drops again by 1°C per hour. Now while the indoor temperature is 0°C or below, food items stored indoors should decay at the slow rate. And from 1°C upwards, they should decay at the fast rate. The consequences: While you are living in a cold place, your food items decay slowly. If you heat the place up, the decay rate may accelerate. All this would be a bit more complicated than before, but it would make sense in my view. Because if you temporarily leave a base, temperatures would likely drop below zero, and you could leave food indoors there to greet you on your return.

[Scyzara]

1 hour ago, Hotzn said:

While you are living in a cold place, your food items decay slowly. If you heat the place up, the decay rate may accelerate. All this would be a bit more complicated than before, but it would make sense in my view. Because if you temporarily leave a base, temperatures would likely drop below zero, and you could leave food indoors there to greet you on your return.

I'd love it if the mechanics worked that way.

It would certainly make food storage a less counterintuitive topic than currently. (I for one find it odd to rather store cooked meat outdoors on the floor than inside a container in a -3°C cold cabin. Not even to mention the use of outdoor corpses as "containers" to preserve your stuff).

In my opinion, a temperature-dependent deterioration system would be more intuitive, realistic and probably also easier to understand (regarding places like the mountaineer's hut or caves) than the current indoor/outdoor system. 

Thanks for the tip about the containers, I'll try to make as much of my trash vanish as possible the next time I'm in TWM.^^

[SteelFire]

I can confirm that putting ruined sewing kits into a container also makes them disappear. Ruined food will also disappear from containers.

I'll also throw my support behind a more complex food, and other stuff, decay system. We definitely need something like this, especially when they add seasons and we can potentially grow and harvest more diverse food sources. It would be great if an unheated building could be used like a root cellar. Of course, it also doesn't make sense to me why stuff decays so fast. It's not like there's enough pre-packaged foods available to survive long-term anyway. To get a decent stockpile of pre-packaged foods you have to do some pretty extensive adventuring, which brings its own potentially deadly hazards.

It would be great to see a combination of several things, with a more complex health/injury/sickness system, combined with a better storage/decay system and have planning and strategy be a bigger factor. Get sick or injured and can't hunt for a week or two? Hope you stored a bit of non-perishables for the lean times. Oh, you didn't? Sucks to be you starving to death.

[cekivi]

This also came up on another forum. More depth to the indoor heating mechanic would be most welcome!

 

[Nasdaq401]

20 hours ago, Scyzara said:

I can confirm that not only burnt-up flares continue to exist, but also various other used-up or expired items (e.g. sewing kits, whetstones, bows, expired food and sodas). They can neither be harvested nor destroyed nor do they have any use (yet). Maybe 0% condition meat can be used as a decoy, haven't tried that yet.^^

I've built a garbage heap behind my base where I collect all the trash, but I don't particularly like the new mechanics to be honest.

Another thing is I'm starting to stumble across more and more 0% food and soda cans while exploring the maps now. (I'm on day 125 and have explored 2.5 maps so far - currently working on some "stocktaking" project, thus I take my time and explore everything extremely thoroughly). At least 1/3 of the food I come across on day 125 has already rotten away and another third is somewhere below 30% condition. I don't mind that much, just found it a bit odd as I had thought the expiration date timers were set to 1000 days (=3 years) and not 3 months.

If things continue to deteriorate at this rate, I'll probably find nothing but expired food on the last map around day 200. Well, I'll write a comment about that once I'm done with my project and know for sure.

I noticed this as well! It's only day 30 on my playthrough and almost all of the food I find now is under 50%. Hopefully people will continue to give feedback and they can tweak it properly.  Also you can actually cook ruined meat too lol very strange