Dried Meat

[FittedBuckle]

Please excuse the long paragraphs I have here. I had originally written this as a letter to Hinterland but was then instructed to post my idea here on the forum. I'll trim it down to so you can see the idea i had in mind.

The idea I had in mind was a game mechanic to allow the preserving of meat in the form of "salting and drying", or "smoking". The smoking aspect would be an addition to the campfire mechanic and would allow you to take a certain weight of meat, be it fish, bear, or any whatever meat be in your inventory, and select to "smoke" it until it is preserved like jerky, which could greatly reduce or even eliminate the odor emanating from it. This would also allow you to carry more meat on long expeditions, or store more meat for when the blizzards hit, as they will always do. While this could allow you to potentially preserve large quantities of meat to store for future use, it is not meant to be an easy way to hoard lots of food so you can turtle up and wait out the apocalypse. We must always keep moving after all. Smoking would take longer to do, and would require a campfire instead of a stove, thus increasing your chances of encounters with Bear Islands ravenous inhabitants.

The salting method produce a similar product, a preserved, dried meat, but would have an effect more like actual jerky due to the salt content, providing both nutrients but also a sense of thirst. The mechanic could be selected from the survival wheel, merely combining the salt and meat in selected quantities and once combined, could be set out to cure indoors, much like the animal hides, and like the animal hides would also be a time consuming process. The trade off would be that this method would be safer, but at the risk of increased thirst due to the salt content. Salt could be added to the game since salt is one of the most common materials around due to it's uses in cooking, industry, and even road clearance, and thus finding this valuable material would prove invaluable, if you are willing to brave the elements for it.

Each type of dried meat, be it smoked salmon, or salted and dried moose, could have different nutrition values, and even weights. This form of "jerky" could also have similar spoilage times depending on your studio's needs for balance.
 

[FittedBuckle]

I see your point. They've made many improvements to the game over the years. Hopefully they take a look.

 

[UTC-10]

Hinterland would have to decide that food preservation, which is conspicuously absent from the game mechanics, is necessary for general game play.  For story mode, it really wasn't necessary and for survival mode, it was up to the player what he or she does with food management.  I think that, for the time being, they would want to concentrate on getting story mode done and giving incremental things to survival mode, rather than introduce what would be a brand new game mechanic, but they might surprise us yet. 

[Calico]

Folks have been asking for some sort of meat preservation mechanic so consistently that I'd bet that it will happen eventually, though probably only in survival mode. I'm sure Hinterland is taking all due time and care to make sure it fits into the game properly in terms of both balance and tone.

Look how long it took to be able to break down campfires (and that is a purely aesthetic fix), but enough people asked, so it happened. 

[The Black Knight]

Agree! Dried meat and bow drill are great abscenes in the game. Furthermore, could eat ruined meat shoud not be an option. 0% meat should dissappear even if you place it on the snow. The dried meat would be the option to long term food stock pile in different maps but not for ever.. around day 300 we almost hunt by sport and in some cases dor the hides (moose and bears)