Observations on Hunting, Wood, and Hunger Investment

[kazerima]

DISCLAIMER: This is not a guide, this post was intended as balance feedback indicating possible explanations for frequent starvation related deaths. The position held was based on a lack of information about certain recipes and burning times, the misconceptions have been acknowledged and addressed further on.

I finally had some time to give BTW another couple runs and I think I found where all my food shanks have been disappearing to. In order to stay alive through the first few days I need to make sure I have stable supplies of both meat and fuel for campfires. I'll be breaking down my observations of this into two parts, one for each, in an attempt to break down the major food sinks.

Meat:
In the early game you need a constant supply of meat to survive, meaning you need both abundant enough prey and to be capable of reaching your prey without burning more hunger than you receive from either cooking it or curing it. If your environment is too flat, it's easy to end up chasing prey around without landing enough hits as it has no elevation to slow it down. If your environment is too hilly, you have to jump in order to sneak up on prey, as placing dirt slabs scares the animals away, either way you lose more hunger. After a certain point, it's more resource efficient to build a new hole to hide in rather than find your way back to base. Curing meat also relies on landing enough hits on a creeper using hit and run tactics to avoid triggering its explosion, expensive unless you get lucky enough to find one in a pit.

Wood:
I think this is possibly the bigger issue here, as most of my first and second days have been eaten up by scraping wood sticks and sawdust off of trees. Given that wood is needed to build your fire, fuel it, and hunt animals, you need as much as you can get away with. Campfires are a large resource investment in not just wood, but hunger as well, as the Plough can consume nearly an entire cooked meat's worth of hunger just to start a fire up. It also takes nearly a full shank worth of time for food to cook if you have the fire going, meaning building a campfire is a 3-3.5 hunger investment in order to be able to start cooking. That's not even counting the hunger expended scraping away trees for wood. The cost of breaking down the block with each scrape is small but it adds up over a while.
At present, I don't know of any way to generate fuel more efficiently without hoping for a coal vein near the surface of my hiding hole or if there's some way to make use of logs in a campfire to make it burn longer once you get string on the second day. (still relying on self-discovery and release notes for information.) At present, I've found little use for an axe right away, as logs become just two sticks and my hiding hole is bright enough to get by on non-gloom nights instead of building a wooden house that can be consumed by flame.

I hope this helps in tracking down people's starvation causes. As a player I'm drawn towards trying to maximize my time at nights, so I seek out a way to make use of what resources I have instead of wanting to wait out the first night until the loot drops. I just discovered the spreading nature of campfires, which helps somewhat, but I feel may discourage me from cooking anything during my first night until I have enough meat to cook on two fires. I feel like the expense involved in the campfires may be why players are currently so focused on trying to optimize their effectiveness in order to achieve a suitable return on investment instead of pouring fuel on and hoping it's enough to cook the food you need to survive.

[FlowerChild]

Is feedback the right sub-forum for this? I realize these are observations but they seem more targeted towards the player base rather than to me as a designer. Will move it over to general discussion.

It also takes nearly a full shank worth of time for food to cook if you have the fire going, meaning building a campfire is a 3-3.5 hunger investment in order to be able to start cooking.

Errr...no, time is going to pass whether you're cooking or not. Hunger consumed waiting for cooking is thus not an investment in the cooking itself. You can also do other stuff while it's going on.

At present, I've found little use for an axe right away

That's really backwards. Time and hunger consumption wise an axe is a much more efficient way of harvesting wood for a campfire. To get those two sticks with chiseling, you're effectively having to inefficiently (time wise) harvest 8 logs, consuming hunger with each, vs harvest 1 log with an axe, with the splitting of the log in the crafting grid requiring no hunger. Unlike with the cooking, this is also an activity which you have to be actively engaged in, so the difference in time has a real hunger cost as well.

This right here might be the source of your difficulties, as I find whether I have an axe or not is largely what determines my level of desperation. Pre axe I can barely generate enough wood and food to hold off starvation. With one is when I have enough time left over to actually progress.

Also, are you sure you're not overfeeding fuel into your fire? The troubles you're experiencing sound like that might be the cause.

[kazerima]

Thanks for responding. I've just heard from members on the Discord server that sticks are a more efficient source of fuel than sawdust or bark, which might explain my problem. I've been pretty much exclusively using bark and sawdust in my campfires since they used to be tied with sticks for burn time in the furnace pre-AAAHH versions I'm more familiar with while saving all my sticks for making fires, clubs, and way-finding. I didn't make the connection to use the axe as a means of speeding things up because it seemed you could get the same 2 sticks and bonus fuel just by scraping the log down manually with a sharp stone.

[dawnraider]

I've never had problems using exclusively sawdust and bark for fuel. You get so much of it with an axe that fuel really stops being an issue because even with 2 or 3 fires I always have enough to make it through the night without using sticks. And yeah, technically you get the same return for using an axe as a sharp stone, but an axe gives you those resources like 10x faster, either letting you get much more or letting you do other things like hunt and cave.

[kazerima]

technically you get the same return for using an axe as a sharp stone

The last time I checked a log in the crafting grid only grants 2 sticks, not any dust or bark. Is all the other stuff add-ons like the string is from a bow?

[FlowerChild]

The last time I checked a log in the crafting grid only grants 2 sticks, not any dust or bark. Is all the other stuff add-ons like the string is from a bow?

Yes. If I remember correctly, the totals are exactly the same, and you definitely get extra drops other than the 2 sticks.

I've been pretty much exclusively using bark and sawdust in my campfires since they used to be tied with sticks for burn time in the furnace pre-AAAHH versions I'm more familiar with

I don't think that's ever been the case.

[dawnraider]

The extra drops for logs have been a thing for several years now.

In a furnace/oven sticks have always been 1/2 of an item and sawdust/bark 1/8 of an item. That hasn't changed, though campfires I don't know exact numbers.

[kazerima]

My bad then. I knew extra drops on logs were there back when they converted to planks, I just didn't think they'd be tacked on with the sticks as well after the changes. I also never really bothered using sticks in the furnace since I only ever made them when I needed tools, so it's a misconception on my part. I should remember to try out every recipe I find then just in case it has extra drops, I've been avoiding axe usage since I thought I was only getting the two sticks out of it and wondered how useful that would be.

[FlowerChild]

My bad then. I knew extra drops on logs were there back when they converted to planks, I just didn't think they'd be tacked on with the sticks as well after the changes. I also never really bothered using sticks in the furnace since I only ever made them when I needed tools, so it's a misconception on my part. I should remember to try out every recipe I find then just in case it has extra drops, I've been avoiding axe usage since I thought I was only getting the two sticks out of it and wondered how useful that would be.

Could you maybe add a brief note to the top of the OP stating that it's based on misconceptions? I'm just worried that new players may take it as a guide of some sort, and be misled by the inaccuracies.

[SterlingRed]

Here's a few other tips that might be beneficial to your starvation problems.
By night 2 you should be able to light multiple fires to cook more than one food item if you found webs. That should let you have almost full hunger during day 3, and by day 4 have a small surplus. At that point, it just comes down to balancing your time chasing critters while looking for the resources you need to progress. Occasionally your terrain can make that pretty difficult as its easy to find yourself in a race to get sustainable food before you exhaust all reasonably reachable critters.

[Mesh]

Unless you're discovering the mod for the first time and you're exploring it without using any external help, then you should definitely have clay baking in the sun by day 3-4 if not before. I managed to get 16 clay cooking on the second day in my recent playthrough by just digging a rudimentary 4x4x2 hole in the ground, it wasn't perfect and had every chance of being trampled, but you have a solid chance that all 16 will make it through the process unscathed. The campfire is one of the biggest timesinks when you start out and personally, I tend to identify my biggest timesink and take specific steps to reduce it. By nullifying your biggest timesink you can free up time to accomplish progression and other tasks.