Overpowered food source (potatoes)

[Wafflewaffle]

Right now Potatoes are my main source of food, they are easy to find, fast to grow and give an insane amount of Hunger points per potato crop (every farm tile gives, on average, 50% more Hunger points then a wheat farm), they dont need to be grinded, just baked and above all only serve as a food source (while wheat is useful in animal feeding and multiple food recipes).

Before i even find diamonds im usually carrying a full stack of baked potatoes, completely eliminating my fear of starvation.

Am i the only one who thinks they are a bit OP? Im sure FC already noticed something cheeky about them (that man is everywhere at once), but i want to know if im the only one replacing its melon farms and steak factories with boring potato farms?

PS: Sorry for any grammar mistakes

[Ferrus.Manus]

FC said he plans to rework hunger system but it's there somewhere in the far reaches of his cyclopean manuscript called "to do list" so we can only guess when that's happening.

[EpicAaron]

It depends on your world generation. I have travelled many blocks in my world and still have yet to find a village! I personally think the meats are the most OP of the foods.

[Stormweaver]

All of the foods are overpowered. Since most of them you get over time for little or no cost, and can quickly get a surplus...

FC has said he has plans for reworking food and hunger one day. It'll be a good day.

[FlowerChild]

Yeah, that's the thing: food is a total mess. Mojang has been making it easier and easier since introducing the system, when it was already rather trivial when they first introduced it.

You can be certain I'll be getting to it eventually, but at the moment I'm a bit overloaded with fixing Mojang's stuff due to the 1.4 update, and really want to return to working on my own content...at least for awhile. Broadening the scope of the changes the mod makes to vanilla behavior would probably not be wise at the moment as a result.

Don't worry though...I'll get to it :)

[Huli]

edit: well guess that is covered...and here I was stil writing >.<

Personaly I feel like potoatoes fill one hunger too much.

rabble in spoilers :P.

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Why one?

The explantation for my oppinion is that I already need most of the wheat I produce to farm animals. Cows and sheep need both wheat and with hard core sheepcolors A LOT of my wheat is invested there.

Compared to melons they are acctualy not such a nuisance of having to eat and eat and eat wasting a lot of time just to regen a few hearts. One can argue that this should drive you forward to advanced farms, specialy meat, but just like cookies they seem to take up more time than they are worth investing in.
That is if you merely look at melons from a foodperspective through while I keep my point of view in regards to cookies.

Fish does fill less foodbars (iirc) but is harder to obtain if you do not use explosives. This feels wrong to me. I would acctualy like to see the values switched.

Compared to carrots if i consider the "new" pigbreeding and tallow production they also have no real tradeoff.

The only downside so far to potatoes is that you can get poisonus potatoes (and of course exploration for older worlds).

If you would only obtain poisonus potatoes and had to acctualy work them in a certain way to make them edible that might fix their unballanced status even if they fill the same hungerbar (obviously depending on how complicated the machinery is).
Considering that "washing" vegetables is a given in hour society and can even used to peel the skin of potatoe without damaging it maybe this could spark an idea for the ugly mojang *ahem* cystern?

On a related note to that... can you only bake potatoes in the furnace? Because since I found my love for the stewing pot being able to cook meat whenever i want as often I want i feel that I have a huge overflow of coal and potatoes acctualy consumed some of it.

[SterlingRed]

Yeah food is broken. I can't comment on carrots or potatoes though as I don't have any. I can't find a new village in my world. I had one pre 1.4. After 1.4 I searched for 4 hours looking for a new village. I covered 9 desert biomes and 6 plain biomes all newly generated. Completely desolate. /rant.

[Sarudak]

Yeah food is broken. Yeah it would be cool if FC fixed it. But the truth is FC has cooler stuff to work on and fixing food would be no small task. Plus even if he did fix it Mojang would probably come along and bork it again in no time flat by adding yet another easy to obtain food. Basically I'm happy that FC is working on making beacons awesome and giving us cool explosions instead of fixing food right now. :)

[MoRmEnGiL]

An interesting thought would be linking food with villagers somehow. Won't go on about it because this is not a suggestion, but it would take care the surplus food issue mentioned above, plus would add an upkeep of sorts to villager farms and what have you.

[devak]

My problem with Potatoes (and carrots) as a food source, is that they're a guaranteed win. With Wheat, you kind of need a minimum amount of seeds to have a viable output. With Carrots and potatoes, you ALWAYS get more.

I'd love to see the drop rates, or growth rates fixed first, before any major reworking of anything. I think it'll be a relatively easy, quick fix that solves a lot of annoyance.

[Huli]

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My problem with Potatoes (and carrots) as a food source, is that they're a guaranteed win. With Wheat, you kind of need a minimum amount of seeds to have a viable output. With Carrots and potatoes, you ALWAYS get more.

I'd love to see the drop rates, or growth rates fixed first, before any major reworking of anything. I think it'll be a relatively easy, quick fix that solves a lot of annoyance.

Please consider that unlike wheat you also use some up as you re/plant them so a bit of surplus is needed, even through i agree that the minimum amount is rather limited on how much you can find in a village at this point :x. In case of carrots you could eventualy justify it with the need to breed pigs instead of just being able to eat all of them besides other uses (golden carrot...).

As it stands I am unsure about the underlined parts, if you had a similar thought please excuse my elaboration.

[FlowerChild]

I'd love to see the drop rates, or growth rates fixed first, before any major reworking of anything. I think it'll be a relatively easy, quick fix that solves a lot of annoyance.

The thing is, if I can't (or am not prepared to) do something right at present, I'd rather not touch it.

If I start delving into it deep enough to balance the numbers then it will open a whole can of worms where I'll want to tweak "just one more number" until the whole system is redesigned.

For now, it's therefore best for me to leave well enough alone and focus on the other stuff I'm working on.

[Wafflewaffle]

Good to know im not crazy then. Mojang has this weird way of making minecraft systems obsolete by adding... your know... potatoes and the like =(

[FlowerChild]

Good to know im not crazy then. Mojang has this weird way of making minecraft systems obsolete by adding... your know... potatoes and the like =(

Just another example of what I often talk about where players will keep on asking for more power until they ruin their own fun.

In this case, I have no doubt that Mojang was responding to the constant requests for more food items. They're extremely low-hanging fruit and obvious things to ask for, so of course people will suggest them.

Meanwhile though, they aren't considering the impact that has on existing systems, or taking the time to balance those systems to begin with. Heck, vanilla players are still using magic bonemeal for Pete's sake, which pretty much nukes farming balance right out of the gate.

Like, what really needs to be done IMO is that substantially more effort needs to be required for farming and breeding to both increase the associated sense of accomplishment, and to make food harder to come by. Region specific crops might also go a long way to help this, so that you don't just constantly have a surplus of food options regardless of where you are.

Anyways, like I said: I'll get to it, but it's way beyond the point where a quick band aid will solve the underlying problem.

[william711]

I find that the hunger bar is quite effective when your just starting out and dont have any farms. especially since I try to avoid killing animals until I have a wheat farm to replenish the animal supply with. But once you get your first farm up and running the hunger bar becomes obsolete.

[MoRmEnGiL]

The thing is, after you have an automated food farm up and running, food is a non-issue, and well, it should be, this why you built the farm in the first place. So no amount of extra food added makes any difference at all. Before you built this farm, well chances are you live by the meat of animals you came across, or anything edible really, even spider eyes and rotten meat. I don't think there is any big difference by the new foodstuff, given they are harder to come by (when zombies do not drop them).

So all that should matter to us (btw players) is the automation process. The more complicated it is, the more convenient and efficient the end food product should be, so in my views, tweaking the numbers is a bit pointless, tweaking the farming process though opens up a lot of interesting and unique possibilities of new gameplay.

On the other hand, this is probably more involving and complicated than tweaking the numbers, and in the end food is food, people would probably go with the easier to farm and be done with it.

So in the end, what I feel is the whole point of this, is all other uses of farm-able stuff that also happens to be food. Because yeah, food, it's not as if we should be starving after we automate a farm.

[Wafflewaffle]

Because yeah, food, it's not as if we should be starving after we automate a farm.

Thats the main source of my discontent though. As I consider myself an average player, if i dont need to automate my farms to obtain a constant resource of food, well, I wont! FC has proven that if he takes away bad design choices, even the ones that make my life easier (i.e. beds), i enjoy the game better. Hell I enjoy this game more with BTW and all its hardcore then i ever enjoyed vMC before.

Potatoes are bad becouse they proporcionate passive gameplay. Plant it, wait for it, and you wil never run out of food again. No efford required, no tech tree advancements, no liability. Its profit without risk, and on that, economists like myself and game designers like FC agree, that is always bad news.

I never tought i would rant about potatoes but there you have it. Im thankful to know the problem is acknowledged, im thankful the hunger system is on the "to do list", im thankful its not top priority (cuz i think there are more interesting things to spend time coding for) and im thankful for this mod. happy late thanksgiven. Im gonna fill my potato chest some more...

[FlowerChild]

The thing is, after you have an automated food farm up and running, food is a non-issue, and well, it should be, this why you built the farm in the first place.

Yup, I certainly agree. One of the problems right now though, is that IMO there's not much incentive at all for automation of food production (at least not *only* for food), given that it's so ridiculously easy to do manually.

Bonemeal was obviously a big part of that, but it goes way beyond. I personally think it would be very cool if a sustainable food supply required a rather large farm (which is of course great for aesthetics as well as being more rewarding) and was fairly labor intensive, which would further motivate you to automate the process.

Really, that's what I'd be going for with in any such changes, as well as additional challenge in the early game in terms of survival.

[DaveYanakov]

The power of potatoes is completely negated for me by the simple fact that as a byproduct of leather production, your cow farm is going to produce enough steak to feed a small nation. If your spawn includes a village with potatoes, you're lucky in the same way that spawning right next to a dungeon spawner happens once in awhile and negates a little bit of exploration. I found potatoes while expanding the borders of my SSP world and didn't even bother to bring them home as I didn't want to drop 3 mouldings in favor of something with no purpose.

[Pucc]

Personally I'm surprised my Steve hasn't got the meat sweats he went through 6-7 steaks in the space of 10 minutes whilst grinding hemp for my windmill I was, for a short time, expecting dung to be flying out of his rear.

On a serious note, I see the problem that people may have with potatoes but to me they do seem fairly balanced (now that FC has removed their drops from mobs). What I mean is take a look at the food source most people tend to over look, fish, its far more readily available all you need is a water source and to kill a spider for some string and you're set. To me that seems like considerably far less effort than spending a large amount of time searching for a village. Yes, I realise you have to spend time fishing and cannot go off doing something more productive but looking at them in plant terms they have an almost instant growth time and required no grinding or other preparation just cooking this to me would make them a better food source for early game (no automation, no substantial farms) than potatoes and a good night activity. However I tend to find I have all the food I need from my cow and pig farms (not automated at the moment of writing) which are again relatively easier to obtain in comparison to potatoes (just as DaveYanakov stated).

In conclusion, there are problems with this system at every corner and it's not just potatoes that are causing it, in fact the problem was there before potatoes. To fix it's probably going to take careful consideration and precision tweaking to get right and definitely something that can't be altered and fixed on the fly.

[Huli]

Sorry but I have to heavily disagree with you Pucc.

If you compare the fishing rod to potatoes you have to take in consideration that its not self renewable, requires more time to get the same amount of food (one potatoe spoils several fruits of "labor" encouraging exponential increase in foodsupply), does not allow you to be afk, forces you to either wrestle a spider or get lucky early on for string.

While compared to that

Potatoes require you to find a plains or desert on first day exploration. Have farmland prepared for you to use by the villagers, are only hard to find if your map is older and requires expansion of the boarder.

The one positive thing I see in them that has to be mentioned by me through is that they allow you to obtain food early on if you start in a desert or plains with only sheep, which can be very troublesome in large biome maps. Than again...you also have carrots....

[Pucc]

If you compare the fishing rod to potatoes you have to take in consideration that its not self renewable, requires more time to get the same amount of food (one potatoe spoils several fruits of "labor" encouraging exponential increase in foodsupply), does not allow you to be afk, forces you to either wrestle a spider or get lucky early on for string.

Fishing rods aren't renewable? I think they are (trees and spiders) the only addition is a crafting stage which I suppose is what you are referring to when stating self-renewable. In terms of time it really depends on how lucky you are at finding a village, an example for this is I spent almost 8+ on the official anarchy server looking for a village containing potatoes and carrots (didn't even find a ransacked one until the 6 hour stage of my search). I still haven't got any potatoes but someone kindly gave me some carrots :) so I suppose this factor is really relative to your luck and I'm pretty sure villages are rarer than spiders. As for spider luck they drop string 80% for me and now since I can't avoid nighttime I collect almost a full stack fending the beasts off within my first few days of starting a new world. I did mention that fish is usually better before you have any major farms going as soon as you have a cow farm fish is replaced by meat. So to me there's really no necessity for obtaining potatoes as a food source they are just a bonus if you get lucky and are certainly not OP.

TL;DR The effort required to find potatoes outweighs the advantages you gain from growing them due to other food sources being relatively easier to obtain i.e. fish then meat.

[Stormweaver]

If you compare the fishing rod to potatoes you have to take in consideration that its not self renewable, requires more time to get the same amount of food (one potatoe spoils several fruits of "labor" encouraging exponential increase in foodsupply), does not allow you to be afk, forces you to either wrestle a spider or get lucky early on for string.

Fishing rods aren't renewable? I think they are (trees and spiders) the only addition is a crafting stage which I suppose is what you are referring to when stating self-renewable.

Harvest potato, plant potato. That's what he meant by self renewable. You can hide in a small hole and have potatoes forever, but you can't make a fishing rod out of fish.

The vast majority of maps make finding potatoes and carrots easy, making a situation where you have to rely on fish (and such, fighting mobs to do so) far less common.

[Wafflewaffle]

The thing is, after you have an automated food farm up and running, food is a non-issue, and well, it should be, this why you built the farm in the first place.

Yup, I certainly agree. One of the problems right now though, is that IMO there's not much incentive at all for automation of food production (at least not *only* for food), given that it's so ridiculously easy to do manually.

I did talked in IRC about a suggestion regarding incentives to farm automation. I was debunked by someone (can't remember who) that stated that automation is enough incentive for automation.

I'll go have a few beers, maybe when I get brave enough I'll make a post on suggestions subforum. That place gives me the chills.

[Sarudak]

I did talked in IRC about a suggestion regarding incentives to farm automation. I was debunked by someone (can't remember who) that stated that automation is enough incentive for automation.

I'll go have a few beers, maybe when I get brave enough I'll make a post on suggestions subforum. That place gives me the chills.

I wouldn't suggest that... FC has already answered your concerns and further pestering is only going to serve to piss him off.

Whoever told you that automation is enough incentive for automation is wrong though. That's like saying building is enough incentive for building. For many it is but this mod is focused on giving you reasons for building and automation. That's why some processes are excessively annoying to do manually. To encourage automation. Things like milling, dung production and pottery are examples.