Pasta and Rice

[The_Materialist]

Hi there,

I suggest new food items are added to the game: pasta and rice. Both have a high caloric density of 2500kcal/kg and are found in units of 0.25 kg. They need to be cooked 20 min with 0.5 Liter of water per unit in order to be edible. This would make for an interesting choices what you carry with you for an exploration. You could carry 1kg of rice or pasta with you and have 2500 kcal at disposal but you need to cook it first, since you can find fire wood and make a fire to make water and cook the pasta you would need to invest time into the food preparation but have a good caloric density when travelling. The spoiling would be super slow, like jerky slow if uncooked and if cooked the spoiling should be around the spoilage of meat. When cooked the weight triples with the same amount of calories.

EDIT:

The rice and pasta would realistically have 2500-3500 kcal/kg. So I adjust the value per kg to 2500 kcal. The idea is to make a protable and highly efficient food source which is not ready to eat but has to be cooked rigth away to be weight efficient. Since 0.25 packs which can be found would then give you 1000 kcal when cooked. This is certainly not overpowered since this is a rare food item like powerbars and MRE. It is more of an expedition food which has to be cooked in order to eat it.  

[Prestermatt]

I like this idea, particularly the trade off between portability and convenience.  You have to work for the food.

How about dried beans as well?  Take longer to cook, but even more calories?

[Fuarian]

4000 calories is a lot. The food items in TLD don't play by their real life counterparts. So maybe making it be 1500 calories instead for game balance. 

[Prestermatt]

15 minutes ago, Fuarian said:

4000 calories is a lot. The food items in TLD don't play by their real life counterparts. So maybe making it be 1500 calories instead for game balance. 

4000 calories/kg isn't that much more than beef jerky or MREs, which are 3750.

[The_Materialist]

Uncooked Pasta is around 3500 kcal/kg and Other foods in the game aren't realistic too.. (Yes I am looking at you cat tail stalk!)

[Mroz4k]

Yea, the caloric value of this would be way over the top of what you would expect compared to the other foods in the game.

On top of it, because it would be a cookable item, it counts under the cooking skill effect, so cooking it at higher levels would provide more and more calories. 

The fact that MREs are way less despite being specifically designed rare food should be an indicator enough.

Pull down the raw calories to half, that would be more realistic. 

[oplli]

On 28/09/2017 at 7:58 PM, Fuarian said:

4000 calories is a lot. The food items in TLD don't play by their real life counterparts. So maybe making it be 1500 calories instead for game balance. 

1500 calories are really insane. i suggest like 700 calories max and it could desydrate a lot. dont forget it would be only salted paste.

do not forget what is only salted paste

[Prestermatt]

8 hours ago, oplli said:

1500 calories are really insane. i suggest like 700 calories max and it could desydrate a lot. dont forget it would be only salted paste.

Let's remember that salty crackers are 6000 calories per kg.

I think the key to things like pasta, rice, and beans would be making the cooking process more involved – uses considerable amount of potable water, takes time to cook, etc. – rather than making the calorie value very low.  A kg of dry rice or beans should have a lot more calories than an energy bar.

[Mroz4k]

1 hour ago, Prestermatt said:

A kg of dry rice or beans should have a lot more calories than an energy bar.

That is not a good argument. A kg of venison should have significantly more calories than a kg of rice or beans. In the game, it doesn't. Game balance issue.

The fact that crackers have so much is because those items can only be found in size of 0,1kg. To get a kg of them, you need to find 10 boxes. That's difficult to do if we take out the cargo containers out of the equation.

You cant give a kg of rice such great caloric value because it is a single item. It takes significantly more effort to collect 10 packs of salty crackers than a single bag of rice.

In order to make your suggestion viable, the pasta and rice would have to be found in tiny packages of few grams, and that's not very viable.

I like the idea of a rare, heavy cookable food - but its comprised caloric value can be high, especially because it's a food that can be found. Even if it requires cooking first. The benefit I can see to it is the fact it does not smell, and I can see a kg bag used to cook up to 4 meals which would be spoilable quickly and would decrease the weight of the initial bag. 

[The_Materialist]

18 hours ago, Mroz4k said:

A kg of venison should have significantly more calories than a kg of rice or beans. In the game, it doesn't. Game balance issue.

Well venison has around 160-180 kcal/100 g which is 1600-1800 kcal per kg which is nearly double the game value but dry rice has reallistically 3500 kcal/kg and pasta about the same. When cooked it takes up a lot of water and has a reduced ratio due to the weight gain. I already suggested the pasta and rice would tripple in weight when cooked with makes a pack of 0.25 kg pasta = 1000 kcal with current suggestion into a cooked 0.75 kg per 1000 kcal which is 1333 kcal/kg. This is around the value for a tomato soup or dog food. 

[nicko]

Remember the game is not a simulation of real life.  such things as food need to be balanced in game else it would might make the game either to hard or to easy.

Sure pasta and rice sound like a great addition to the game, maybe the devs will add them, or maybe not. I think they have already thought about every food type available. nearly.