Book Research Times

[nicko]

Why is the book research set a 1 hour intervals? Surely this should be set at a minimum .15 minute intervals? also allow more options to do stuff, via cooking.

[Kendov]

this. water takes about 40min to be consumable, large pieces of meat around 90 minutes, and neither fits the 60m intervals of reading. there should either be a partial progress like we have for partially crafting stuff, or options for smaller intervals, although I really prefer the crafting adaption. put the water on the stove, start reading, and stop when you hear it boil without just having wasted 40min

[Khan_Drichthyes]

I tried reading for one hour immediately after starting a can of water on the fire.  Once finished reading,  I still had about 5 minutes before the water was burned off.

[ajb1978]

Agreed.  1 hour increments made sense prior to Vigilant Flame, but with the introduction of the new cooking mechanics, allowing for 15-minute reading intervals makes a ton of sense.

[Soul Sojourner]

I'd settle for 30 min intervals, if nothing else. Particularly if we are to base it on the actual act of reading. Most people I know are not satisfied with 15 mins of straight reading, and usually 30 mins is putting a good dent in a book. With that said, however, myself and most people I know live busy lives or have things to do and will read for a bit, take the pot off the stove or dump noodles in the water etc. and keep reading. Not *really* taking a break from reading at all, but just putting it down long enough to take care of time urgent issues before proceeding.

Since we don't have that multi-tasking capability in game to do things like that ^, it makes sense for us to be able to break at 15 mins to fulfill other tasks before continuing to read.

[ajb1978]

Well I think it would be more difficult to implement, but maybe if the player has a book in their inventory, the "pass time until ready" could become "read book until ready".  Hit that, your inventory opens, you pick a book, and you research it until the food item is done.

Edit: And actually that'd be kinda cool, even if you have one of those non-researchable books, or some newsprint, just to mix it up a bit.  Maybe Will reads an old technical manual just to pass the time, because he's sick of playing cards.  Or read an old newspaper for the same reason.  You get no benefit, it just changes the background sounds.

[Soul Sojourner]

30 minutes ago, ajb1978 said:

Well I think it would be more difficult to implement, but maybe if the player has a book in their inventory, the "pass time until ready" could become "read book until ready".  Hit that, your inventory opens, you pick a book, and you research it until the food item is done.

This.

[nicko]

20 hours ago, Soul Sojourner said:

This.

sounds great! love to see that happen. is there a pass time till ready? already?

[ajb1978]

Yeah, when cooking an item or melting snow, just click on that item and then hit space to "pass time until ready".

[NardoLoopa]

It's good to keep in mind, that with some planning, and quick clicking, you can read an hour of research while boiling water in a can, even at lvl 5 cooking.  You have about a ~2min grace period.

[Silverhour]

On 9/7/2018 at 10:51 AM, ajb1978 said:

Well I think it would be more difficult to implement, but maybe if the player has a book in their inventory, the "pass time until ready" could become "read book until ready".  Hit that, your inventory opens, you pick a book, and you research it until the food item is done.

I've wanted to see the training manuals added to the radial dial so that an option like this could be offered. Nice to see I'm not the only one thinking this.

[ajb1978]

20 hours ago, NardoLoopa said:

It's good to keep in mind, that with some planning, and quick clicking, you can read an hour of research while boiling water in a can, even at lvl 5 cooking.  You have about a ~2min grace period.

Good point, I just confirmed this with a new save and an old one.  You actually can get MORE done at level 1 cooking than you can at level 5.  Your cook times speed up by 30%, but your ready times only decrease by 20%, for a net loss in 10% usable time.

Edit: I'm going to post this as a separate wish-list item, since this seems to be a balancing issue.

[NardoLoopa]

I would say the only balance change necessary is to increase the amount of time until the can dries out / burns-up as your cooking skill increases.  The idea would be that you can still cook faster, but you also maintain the same maximum interval for doing parallel tasks, rather than being slightly penalized for better skills.

I wouldn't consider this high priority, though -- since there's still an available window where it's possible (as noted above).

[Pillock]

If you use the cooking pot you get more time to do stuff.

Maybe that advantage of the pot over the can, countered by the extra carrying weight, is supposed to be balancing factor?

[nicko]

I don't see why they cannot just allow for smaller reading times, instead of 1 hour min. surely just make it either .15 or .30 minutes problem solved maybe ie why are we forced to read for a min hour.