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Food Dispensers


Ben Fargo

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If food is introduced to Dual Universe, it should be done in a way that is as unobtrusive as possible.  It should be something people only need to think about when they do not have enough of it.  My suggestion for doing that uses three new kinds of elements: dispensers, preservation units and preparation units.

 

The purpose of a dispenser would be to ensure people were fed.  Each dispenser would have a capacity and a range.  Capacity would be the number of people it could feed and range would determine the how close people had to come to it to be fed.  Eating would be what I call a background task, which means it is something we assume happens even when it is not depicted in the game.  As long as people periodically came within the range of an available dispenser, they would be considered fed and would not need to do anything else about food.

 

Dispensers with greater capacity and range should require more resources to build.  The smallest range would be only the construct the dispenser was built in.  Dispensers in constructs with larger cores would have a larger potential range and so be more costly to make.  There would also be dispensers that could cover a whole hexagon/pentagon territory or even several adjacent territories.  Like any element, dispensers would have rights associated with them, so they could be designated to only feed certain people.

 

Each dispenser would need one or more storage units attached to it to hold the food.  Food that was stored too long would spoil unless the storage had a preservation unit connected to it.  If it did, the food could remain in it indefinitely without spoilage.  An alternative would be to have elements that combined preservation and storage in one unit.

 

A preparation unit would be an optional element that made food more effective.  It might let the same amount feed more people, it might make the period of time people remain fed longer or it might have other benefits.  Small capacity units could look like kitchen appliances while larger ones would probably have a more industrial appearance.

 

If some was going to be outside the range of a dispenser for an extended period of time, they would need to carry or find food and eat it occasionally.  In the wilderness, how much and how often a person eats should require a conscious decision and be a deliberate action.  This also applies if a settlement or a ship is attacked and its dispensers are disabled or destroyed.  For role playing purposes, eating should be an optional action even when dispensers are available.

 

Producing the food and the effects of eating or not eating food are also important considerations, but I consider those different topics. 

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Well, I'm all in for food ,but not for hunger.

Case in point, having stamina being depleted on your character in the form of a unit like Calories (similar to Joules for ship batteries and capacitors). That being said, food should be "fuel". You don't expend calories by doing nothing - in-game at least - and if we were to apply RPG elements to it, I'd say pilots wearing jumpsuits that reduce Calorie consumption percentually - similar to EVE's role bonuses on ships, that reduce CPU or Wattage cost on modules.

That being said, if we expect the game to have "remote fuel transfer" in the form of magically teleporting items across distances, 

That being said, there are many lore explanations for the luck of thirst, as the players wear biosuits that, you know "Bear Grylls" the thirst part. However, food can be explained via implants in the person's body that can store more energy than average - or even the calories to be absorvbed by the biosuit itself, aka, best weight-loss device ever :P

So, a person could carry the calorie potential of a 10000 kg worth of a human, minus the destroyed cardiovascular system - or, you know, entire body at that point of body fat. And I say could, in the sense of high skillpoint gear access, with them biosuits acting as the "required powergrid" to operate a certain type of armo, like a Powered Exoskeleton or a Power Armor - things that should be energy hungry and be difficult to specialise into.

That means, that the Dispenser idea, is essnetialy having a remote fuel recharger for a score of Power Armor freaks of nature, could make them impossible to overtake in a "king of the hill" scenario.

As I said, I'm all in for "fuel for a avatar" but not for hunger. Hunger sucks, it can kill a player. But calories, can make a person simply be "out of mana" in a way - it won't kill you directly, but if you overstayed your welcome on a battlefield, you'll have some hard time.

And as I said in another thread, having "fuel for the avatar" can create situations were sieges can last a bit longer than "48 hours timer on shield expires - citadel of the enemy org goes bye bye". It can make for an excellent addition to logistics via atrition warfare. Having it being "magicallly removed by an AoE device" is just gonna turn the game into a slugfest of people shooting other people, until Real Life comes knocking and one's side's fighters have to go to work again.

The arguement can be made that "won't suits run on batteries?", but there's a lore part that says that nanoformers run on body heat - and the body stays hot by burning Calories.


This idea of yours COULD work though, by having it be a "remote energy recharger", that gets a super-jacked-up battery in it as "ammunition" and can recharge people who are tagged to use it, thus making a fighting force able to defend a specific objective, and hey, it could even be a logistics job item - Logistics being a "healer" kind of role, like an engineer that is specialised in recharging people's energy, without them having to eat food manually, with the engineer himself being the one to carry a lot of batteries in his backpack in order to compensate for that, with said remote energy recharger" being the signature ability that makes the engineer feel badass, like the Power Armor does the cobat oriented ground assault player.

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As I said, I'm all in for "fuel for a avatar" but not for hunger. Hunger sucks, it can kill a player. But calories, can make a person simply be "out of mana" in a way - it won't kill you directly, but if you overstayed your welcome on a battlefield, you'll have some hard time.

 

And as I said in another thread, having "fuel for the avatar" can create situations were sieges can last a bit longer than "48 hours timer on shield expires - citadel of the enemy org goes bye bye". It can make for an excellent addition to logistics via atrition warfare. Having it being "magicallly removed by an AoE device" is just gonna turn the game into a slugfest of people shooting other people, until Real Life comes knocking and one's side's fighters have to go to work again.

 

The arguement can be made that "won't suits run on batteries?", but there's a lore part that says that nanoformers run on body heat - and the body stays hot by burning Calories.

 

 

Dammit Twerk, you raise too many good points in one post! Luckily for me I very much agree.  

 

A ranged dispenser would kind of eat away the immersion part (a text pops up saying "you are properly fed"?), but having dedicated food storage/preservation element sounds good. 

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Case in point, having stamina being depleted on your character in the form of a unit like Calories (similar to Joules for ship batteries and capacitors). That being said, food should be "fuel". You don't expend calories by doing nothing - in-game at least - and if we were to apply RPG elements to it, I'd say pilots wearing jumpsuits that reduce Calorie consumption percentually - similar to EVE's role bonuses on ships, that reduce CPU or Wattage cost on modules.

 

So, a person could carry the calorie potential of a 10000 kg worth of a human, minus the destroyed cardiovascular system - or, you know, entire body at that point of body fat. And I say could, in the sense of high skillpoint gear access, with them biosuits acting as the "required powergrid" to operate a certain type of armo, like a Powered Exoskeleton or a Power Armor - things that should be energy hungry and be difficult to specialise into.

 

[......]

As I said, I'm all in for "fuel for a avatar" but not for hunger. Hunger sucks, it can kill a player. But calories, can make a person simply be "out of mana" in a way - it won't kill you directly, but if you overstayed your welcome on a battlefield, you'll have some hard time.

 

So, if implemented, maybe slowly over time, you lose this "mana" or calories, and everything you do takes longer. You are slower to move around, you mine slower, and build slower. It never kills you, but slows you down. A lot of survival games have fast hunger/thirst loss. I feel like in a game like this, it would be very slowly so your game time doesn't revolve around eating and drinking water. The more you do in a short span of time though, the faster your mana drains.

 

If this becomes a thing though, it should be far down the road, focusing more on the bigger aspects like building and exploring. Put this up on the fridge and fetch it later when thinking of new levels to add to the game.

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So, if implemented, maybe slowly over time, you lose this "mana" or calories, and everything you do takes longer. You are slower to move around, you mine slower, and build slower. It never kills you, but slows you down. A lot of survival games have fast hunger/thirst loss. I feel like in a game like this, it would be very slowly so your game time doesn't revolve around eating and drinking water. The more you do in a short span of time though, the faster your mana drains.

 

If this becomes a thing though, it should be far down the road, focusing more on the bigger aspects like building and exploring. Put this up on the fridge and fetch it later when thinking of new levels to add to the game.

 

I like this.

 

If the devs ever feel like adding a stamina bar, why not just make the food affect the stamina regeneration in a minuscule way.

 

Say, if you want to perform stamina-draining tasks at a high rate you'd want to eat, say once every or other hour, and get a food buff to your stamina. And if you feel like eating food must be a requirement, then make the stamina regeneration slowly drop without food until it reaches near-zero after say 24 hours or something.

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So, if implemented, maybe slowly over time, you lose this "mana" or calories, and everything you do takes longer. You are slower to move around, you mine slower, and build slower. It never kills you, but slows you down. A lot of survival games have fast hunger/thirst loss. I feel like in a game like this, it would be very slowly so your game time doesn't revolve around eating and drinking water. The more you do in a short span of time though, the faster your mana drains.

 

If this becomes a thing though, it should be far down the road, focusing more on the bigger aspects like building and exploring. Put this up on the fridge and fetch it later when thinking of new levels to add to the game.

Yeah, the idea is for hunger to slow you down, as I said, it shouldn't be something that kills you by itself. Slower is relevant, if you got no calories to burn, you can only walk, you can't sprint - and you sure as heck can't use  jet-pack or any other armor module you got on, either shield boosters or anything else. And as I said, thirst is taken care by the biosuit the avatar wears, so it's not as much as "hunger" than "player fuel" really. Hunger is simply the body's fuel counter going down, at least in my opinion.

 

And yeah, there's no need for food per se to be at launch, but it sure as hell would be a great thing to have rudimentary food rations acting like "potions" in the game at launch, that can be made by combining different kinds of elements to create them, case in point. carbon and hydrogen to create sugar, which can be used to create different foods. 

 

IT's FutureSpace after all. We don't actually need farms, we can procure food via molecular 3D printers :P

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Dammit Twerk, you raise too many good points in one post! Luckily for me I very much agree.  

 

A ranged dispenser would kind of eat away the immersion part (a text pops up saying "you are properly fed"?), but having dedicated food storage/preservation element sounds good. 

Well, in EVE, skill-point accelerators do have an expiration timer on them ( so people do not hoard them and sell them when they are drained off of th emarket, since accelerators are dropped in certain events in-game). However, food and / or narcotics (if and when they may be implemented), should have an expiration date, that is slowed down significantly when in storage. It would make people who produce food have a steady revenue, by selling quantities and it could lead later on ( if agriculture comes into the game ) for starting players to be able to generate revenue by producing and selling food - which the expiration dates guarantee a certain demand in the markets.

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Food and drink naturally give rise to food farming and water bottling on rocks that can support it. This also means that people will be drawn back to places where they can obtain the food and drink.

 

To accommodate the spacefaring people there might need to be resource converters that can convert a resource into food or drink. e.g. Some gasses can be converted into water or alcohol. Any organics can be converted to a grey nutritious sludge, and organics can be grown in special elements.

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Food and drink naturally give rise to food farming and water bottling on rocks that can support it. This also means that people will be drawn back to places where they can obtain the food and drink.

 

To accommodate the spacefaring people there might need to be resource converters that can convert a resource into food or drink. e.g. Some gasses can be converted into water or alcohol. Any organics can be converted to a grey nutritious sludge, and organics can be grown in special elements.

Well... turning gases like methane ones into water is... quite the alchemical trick.

 

I mean, water on a planet can be purified into drinking water. It takes a boiler. Seriously. A boiler. Or, start a fire, get a pot, boil sea water, let the steam drip into a new pot, while the salt remains at the bottom of the original pot. Done. Repeat until sea water is fully purified. Works on muddy water as well. 

 

However, same deal can be done with a biosuit. You drink, you piss, it turns it into drinking water again via dialysis, while - and I'm just theorising here - using your own bodily produced ammonia to clean your body and sanitise it.

 

As I said, I am an advocate for Calories, but not hunger or thirst. Biosuits cover the thirst part at least and technology could cover the energy part of storing excessive levels of Joules in batteries within a person's body, instead of storing it as body fat - either white or brown fat. After all, we eat to replenish our energies.

 

 

This idea though of rechaging energy, could give birth to some... weird workarounds. Instead of "health potions" we get Energy Drinks. They have Electrolytes, as some would say. They restore energy in bulks, but you get a "cooldown" on the item, because you could suffer blood poisoning if you were to drink two many too fas - or don't have the cooldown but have a skill training that makes you able to tolerate more energy drinks while before starting to feel blood poisoning. Call the skill " Conditioning Training ". Not a must for anyone who's not gonna go into ground PvP, but definitely something that could work in a niche situation.

 

 

P.S. : For all we know,, nano-fields can be applied within batteries to increase the Joule capacity, while the skil ltraining of each person around "stamina recharge" coudl get more ampere-hours out of a certain implanted battery within their body.

 

To be honest, I'd be happy with a person needing to recharge their batteries by eating without hunger that can kill you directly. I mean, without energy, you can't run from an animal that's attacking you, if you use an energy weapon you're probably not gonna be able to power it and your shields won't recharge, so, you're good as dead ( which is why melee is amazing and without it I feel defenseless kthbai :D )

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The idea is for hunger to slow you down

This will psychologically make it sound like a bad thing, a chore (like what rest xp was in WoW). Instead of "You are low on calories, therefore you have slowed down", phrase it like "The increased caloric intake has given you excess energy that allows you to do more, faster"

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Food and drink naturally give rise to food farming and water bottling on rocks that can support it. This also means that people will be drawn back to places where they can obtain the food and drink.

 

To accommodate the spacefaring people there might need to be resource converters that can convert a resource into food or drink. e.g. Some gasses can be converted into water or alcohol. Any organics can be converted to a grey nutritious sludge, and organics can be grown in special elements.

You could also do it another way and have hydroponics modules for longer ships or ways to store large amounts of food in a small space (dehydrated food for example though probably something a little more advanced or different)

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You could also do it another way and have hydroponics modules for longer ships or ways to store large amounts of food in a small space (dehydrated food for example though probably something a little more advanced or different)

 

For the hydroponics, I feel like they should contain growing to planets only. Not making a way to grow in space which will cause people to focus on ground elements of the game. If everything can be done from space, you will miss out on a lot of cool features they are implementing.

 

For dehydrated food, this sounds cool. You would need to build a machine that can dehydrate food for easier storage, meaning you could store more and/or carry more on your person as well as on ships. Then there could be another machine to re-hydrate food, as you produce/farm food, you can dehydrate in a large scale, sell/transport, then mass rehydrate after buying/transporting.

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For the hydroponics, I feel like they should contain growing to planets only. Not making a way to grow in space which will cause people to focus on ground elements of the game. If everything can be done from space, you will miss out on a lot of cool features they are implementing.

 

For dehydrated food, this sounds cool. You would need to build a machine that can dehydrate food for easier storage, meaning you could store more and/or carry more on your person as well as on ships. Then there could be another machine to re-hydrate food, as you produce/farm food, you can dehydrate in a large scale, sell/transport, then mass rehydrate after buying/transporting.

but what if I want a colony in space or a city ship in space? I can't always be importing food. they could take a large amount of power and work as well as other resources though so that only large ships and stations can have them though. Also there is always the need for fuel so that would already draw ships back to a port probably before the need for food would so most wouldn't even bother if they are always going to have to be in a port before they could run out anyway.

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Well... turning gases like methane ones into water is... quite the alchemical trick.

No more a trick than summoning a carbon copy of yourself from a parallel dimension ;)

 

Gas harvesting off planets could be a thing, especially for fuels such as hydrogen, but we are talking about water here. Ice is the simplest source but it's not impossible to use gases as a source, it just requires a few more steps in the process.

 

The terrestrial planets are rich in heavier gases and gaseous compounds, such as carbon dioxide, nitrogen, oxygen, ozone, and argon. In contrast, the gas giant atmospheres are composed mostly of hydrogen and helium.

 

Put hydrogen and oxygen together, set it on fire and boom: you have water as a by-product. Is it the simplest way of obtaining water? Probably not, as ice is a much simpler source, but since water is likely required growing plants it would be nice to be able to get it in multiple ways.

 

That all said, this is a game so this could all be simplified away into an element or two.

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Gas harvesting off planets could be a thing, especially for fuels such as hydrogen, but we are talking about water here. Ice is the simplest source but it's not impossible to use gases as a source, it just requires a few more steps in the process.
 
The terrestrial planets are rich in heavier gases and gaseous compounds, such as carbon dioxide, nitrogen, oxygen, ozone, and argon. In contrast, the gas giant atmospheres are composed mostly of hydrogen and helium. 

 

Put hydrogen and oxygen together, set it on fire and boom: you have water as a by-product. Is it the simplest way of obtaining water? Probably not, as ice is a much simpler source, but since water is likely required growing plants it would be nice to be able to get it in multiple ways.

 

Nice! Someone watched the Martian.

 

It would be a cool feature though where you could extract gases from gaseous planets and use it for fuel for ships or to power machines/facilities/power plants. It could be sold in canisters or gas tanks.

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Put hydrogen and oxygen together, set it on fire and boom: you have water as a by-product. Is it the simplest way of obtaining water? Probably not, as ice is a much simpler source, but since water is likely required growing plants it would be nice to be able to get it in multiple ways.

 

Now do we simulate the explosion and possibly cause things to actually explode or just generate the small amount of water

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No more a trick than summoning a carbon copy of yourself from a parallel dimension ;)

 

Gas harvesting off planets could be a thing, especially for fuels such as hydrogen, but we are talking about water here. Ice is the simplest source but it's not impossible to use gases as a source, it just requires a few more steps in the process.

 

The terrestrial planets are rich in heavier gases and gaseous compounds, such as carbon dioxide, nitrogen, oxygen, ozone, and argon. In contrast, the gas giant atmospheres are composed mostly of hydrogen and helium.

 

Put hydrogen and oxygen together, set it on fire and boom: you have water as a by-product. Is it the simplest way of obtaining water? Probably not, as ice is a much simpler source, but since water is likely required growing plants it would be nice to be able to get it in multiple ways.

 

That all said, this is a game so this could all be simplified away into an element or two.

There's quite the difference. One is a byproduct of quantum probabilities. The other violates the principle of elemental properties. To turn methane into water, yu need to fission it, either by chemical processes, since methane is CH4 , which means it's a Carbon atom and 4 of Hydrogen. Notice there's no oxygen in there.

 

You can't simply "mix" hydrgeo and oxygen, light them up and have water. There's a need for a chemical reaction, usually involving peroxides which interact with any acid to create oxygen, then have the oxygen funneled into a chamber where another hydrate acid, can interact with a - usually - ferromagnetic metal to procure hydrogen.

 

Guess what methane is not. Exactly, it's not an acid. 

 

The only way to turn carbon into oxygen for the purpose of turning methane into water, is by fusion, and using fusion to procure water, is like breaking the chicken to make an omelette.

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I propose the use of quantum probabilities to exchange the methane molecules for hydrogen and oxygen atoms, perhaps even their complete pure water molecules. This new technology can then be used to turn farts to life giving water. A fart-purifier if you will. This will save the worlds cattle farms and in so doing ensure beef for all. The steaks have never been higher.

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I propose the use of quantum probabilities to exchange the methane molecules for hydrogen and oxygen atoms, perhaps even their complete pure water molecules. This new technology can then be used to turn farts to life giving water. A fart-purifier if you will. This will save the worlds cattle farms and in so doing ensure beef for all. The steaks have never been higher.

technically it will also doom other universes to endless fart smells

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I propose the use of quantum probabilities to exchange the methane molecules for hydrogen and oxygen atoms, perhaps even their complete pure water molecules. This new technology can then be used to turn farts to life giving water. A fart-purifier if you will. This will save the worlds cattle farms and in so doing ensure beef for all. The steaks have never been higher.

GENIOUS.

 

The stakes, are not the only thing that's never been higher xD

 

P.S. : I hope that last one was a pun, otherwise that's some coincidental comedy to the likes I've never been witness to xD

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  • 3 weeks later...

You guys are seriously overthinking the whole issue of getting water in space. In real life, asteroids have ICE in them. Just mine the ice, then you have water. All this talk about turning carbon into water is just so cringy when you actually know how extremely impractical and wasteful it would actually to turn carbon into oxygen just for the sake of drinking water.

 

Besides, mining for ice to get water is so much cooler. 

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You guys are seriously overthinking the whole issue of getting water in space. In real life, asteroids have ICE in them. Just mine the ice, then you have water. All this talk about turning carbon into water is just so cringy when you actually know how extremely impractical and wasteful it would actually to turn carbon into oxygen just for the sake of drinking water.

 

Besides, mining for ice to get water is so much cooler. 

Ice in asteroids is isotope full. Isotope = really not something you should be drinking.

 

Mining Ice belts, would be an exellent source of isotopes for cold-fusion reactors, but not really for drinking the water itself.

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