"curved Arrows And Interesting Mushrooms", quality tags & herblore

Overhauling item quality tags is going good and going to be sweet!
New style of item tagging will affect to whole game world as there will be wider variety of individual characteristics for each item; leaking wooden tubs and curved arrows etc.

Rudimentary stage of HERBLORE has been implemented now. It's thrilling to play (even as developer) with strange berry bushes, odd grasses and interesting mushrooms around.

I'm very, very, very excited about these two major additions and going to provide you with some screenshots and more detailed information soon enough.

Oh the embarrassment of being killed by an NJ with a flimsy club.

or a cross-eyed njerpez with a curved arrow

a fully realized quality system is a necessity for a full crafting system.
Then you can have low skill crafters making their first tools and those tools are low quality too. The combination of low skill and low quality tool makes things take for ever, have a higher chance for critical fails and no result at all much less a good result.
By the time the character has progressed to making good tools, he starts to make good out put, when he gets his crafting specialty into the 80s, has great tools and acquires fine components, he can really start making some excellent value, excellent quality prestige items.

I am fairly new to URW, so please forgive me if this sounds stupid, but would I be correct in assuming that old saves will be incompatible with the new version?

Thanks

Two thing I see the game needing after this change:

First - giving some love to mushrooms by making their nutrition a little better, adding in some useful "potion-like" shrooms that do something useful (healing, stimulant, vigor, speed etc) and adding the option in to dry them for preservation. As it is currently mushrooms just are not good enough food to bother with, and if they become hard to identify players may just opt to outright ignore them like modern people.

Second - to add some poisonous and/or otherwise useless "herbs" or "vegetables".


Wondering how you plan to do the plants' icons. You can't really get away with making a yellow flower in real life NOT be a yellow flower. Perhaps until you have the skill you don't even notice it? or maybe the world gets lots of yellow flowers but after you get high enough skill you can tell them apart? Randomized plants?

They are compatible, actually, the world just works differently around them. (I think.)

We have hardly any herbs with "sedative" effect. Have you ever worked into the late night to finish construction/log job, just find your sleeping pattern out of sync with day - night cycle? a wild poppy tea in the evening would correct that sleeping pattern in a jiffy!

IMHO, that would be kind of out of place. Nutrition value can definitely use a boost, but magic potions? I can see all kinds of medicines and dried spices from herbs and maybe even some mushrooms, but I would very strongly oppose the idea of magic-like potions in the game.

That's actually not what I meant - I don't mean to suggest mushrooms that make you invisible or make wounds disappear or make you grow taller. There are numerous ways within the game setting and with the existing medicinal effects tags to make some very effective tools for the player ranging from anti-infection to sedatives to stimulants to pain reduction.

The problem is that the primary motivation to even care about mushrooms (that they taste good) is not present in the game, thus little motivation for the player to care about them at all. Especially when they might kill you. It's bad enough when there is a list somewhere you can check, but when the mushrooms themselves are mostly unidentified players are just going to ignore them and they become very complexly defined and coded pixel art.

Now the even better solution is of course to have taste matter somehow. When I was developing my game happiness was a factor and good food kept you happier. In that situation a player wants to find all those little rare tasty bits in their environment. A similar approach seems to have been adopted in Project Zomboid. I'd love to see mood become relevant here as well.

Could people have quality tags too? 'Portly Farmer' or 'Burly Adventurer'

Dogs too, which would be even better. After having a dog for a couple of years he would be very strong from eating elk meat and fighting wolves/warriors!