Berries as a rare resource and songbirds as a way to find them

[NumptyDumpty]

I think The Long Dark could use another plant-based source of calories aside from cattails, and berries seem like the obvious choice. I do have an idea to make them feel distinct from the other harvestable plants, though, and at the same time add to the character of the game.

I really like the fact that you can use crows to find corpses/carcasses, and I think a similar system using songbirds could help you find berry bushes. I imagine these bushes being at least as rare as corpses/carcasses as well.

Now there could be a fairly straightforward replication of the crow system: if you see songbirds on a bush or perhaps on a nearby tree or I suppose even circling (though that'd be a little odd) then you'd know there's a berry bush in the area. But I think it'd be neat for the cue to be aural as well as visual. You could have a small library of songbird songs and one or a couple of them would be indicative of a nearby berry bush. I think it'd be even more interesting if the berry song(s) was randomly assigned each time you create a game, as then no matter how experienced you become with the game there'd be at least one thing you'd genuinely have to learn on the fly with each playthrough.

Having a risk of poison berries seems quite fitting for the tone of the game, and the birdsong system could of course work with that as well. Maybe in any given game there are a dozen different songs you can hear, and maybe five of them indicating a berry bush. But two of them would mean an edible berry bush, and three would mean a poison one. It'd be up to the player to learn the difference each game if they want to efficiently/safely make use of berries as a calorie source.

Overall I think this would add just enough variety to foraging while also making the player feel more connected to the gameworld in general and their current playthrough in particular. Let me know what you think.
 

[Mixxut]

I like this idea! Another option to spot poisonous berries could be that there are no songbirds near a  poisonois berry bush. This would make the mechanic a lot simpler and avoid confusion

 

[NumptyDumpty]

The confusion/challenge is sorta what I'm going for.  I think if there were no birds singing around the poison bushes you'd almost never have to worry about eating them, since you'd never to be drawn toward them by the sound and if you happened to stumble upon them you'd have to be really distracted to take them without noticing that there's no birdsong.

And while I'm firmly of the opinion that gameplay should trump realism if the two can't be reconciled, I think it's worth pointing out that berry bushes that are poisonous to humans are still edible for the birds. So they'd have no reason not to chirp their little heads off, unless they're trying to do humans a solid.