Decay mechanic fix

[druffzilla]

I hope you guys are already working on a new mechanic and this post is redundant, but if not, I hope this could inspire you;

If I'm right in my assumption that items spawn once you enter a region or house, which in game logic is seen as a new map just as a region, then that is the main problem. Items always get generated with a random condition. It doesn't matter if your alive for 5 days or 500, the items conditions are always the same. And the item degradation also only starts once you first inspect an object, all it takes to get a more realistic, less exploitable game mechanic is to start the decay process as soon as the item gets generated in the beginning of the game.

If its to much for the engine to generate every item in every region and every house in the beginning of the game and then have them all degenerate, there could be a mechanic that most food items for example which last about a maximum of 300 ingame days get generated with a maximum condition percentage of 50% after day 150, a maximum condition of 90% after day 270 and so on, after day 300 the items could just get a maximum of 5% because actually most of the stuff never decays completely...

Items like tools, guns, flares, gasoline would not be affected by this, items like clothing, matches, food like salt crackers, beef jerky or soda cans in a much lower rate, maybe a 1500 days maximum...

This mechanic could be tweaked that for example everything in the outdoors decays in a 500% rate, everything in outdoor containers in a 200% rate...

If anyone has any ideas how to improve this or how this would be exploitable don't hesitate to write them down.

[Hotzn]

The decay mechanic has been discussed at length in the past. While it would make sense for all items on all maps to decay at the same rate and to start decaying at the same time, this would also mean less incentive to travel to new regions after a while. I would leave this up to the devs, to me it's not a priority.

[elloco999]

I believe it was a conscious choice to have the degradation start once an item is touched. Otherwise you wouldn't find anything other than items that don't degrade after x days. That might be more realistic but it is also not considered much fun by a lot of people.

Personally I'm all for it. Especially now that we can craft most necessary items.