[IDEA] Settlement Food Overhaul

[SirTwist]

I already have an idea for overhauling the settlement system. I like the OP's idea, and if they will hear me out, I think I can add to it. Aside from fixing walls, doors, roofs, and even prefab buildings, one of my ideas is a settlement armory. What this does is this, you assign a settler to it, then you give them say metal armor that is better than stock. That settler takes the armor and replicates it, and everyone grabs a copy of it. this would also work for weapons, that is based on jobs around the settlement. farmers and scavengers get pistols only. Guards, whether in settlement, part of a scavenger group, or a provisioning group, has access to rifles, shotguns, and pistols. They can carry a pistol they like, and a longer ranged weapon. And the same can be said of provisioners. They get their choice of weapons. Armor for exterior settlement work can include power armor. (If you have extra frames and pieces of armor itself, and even fusion cores.) Walls, fortifications, turrets, etc. would also add to defenses. Adding food storage would, of course, also add to the defenses, as well. Without fresh food, and carefully preserved, and packaged food, the provisioners should attract even less attention by all the hostiles out there. Add to this, a secured, or a tad more secure, growing area, and you could, potentially, be looking at settlements that don't need help, at all. (One of my major pet peeves about the game is saving some settlement or another, when I am either on the other side of the map, or in the middle of a mission, or something like that. And you have to keep doing it over, and over, and over. If a settler stubs a toe, you have to go and kiss the boo boo.)

[Athanasa]

I already have an idea for overhauling the settlement system. I like the OP's idea, and if they will hear me out,

 

The post was never my ideas. Well, I mean, SOME of them are. But it's really a collection of everyones ideas that I've stumbled across and thought. I think I wrote down somewhere that it was a compilation... Anyhoo, I'll add your idea to the list. Tomorrow, when I'm not decorating my settlements at 4am.

[Darkangel13]

Wooow this looks awesone

[Flyzakifm]

XD is there any fruit coming out of this bundle of ideas...cuz that would grant someone a cookie... and an endorsement

[Athanasa]

XD is there any fruit coming out of this bundle of ideas...cuz that would grant someone a cookie... and an endorsement

 

Not yet. :< Sad times.

[Flyzakifm]

everyone must be working on sexy clothes and no clothes mods.... im enjoying all the nakedness, i am.... but please ... develop something like this aswell XDDD as much as naked companions distract me from the games weak points ... i would actually like to fix them at some point XDD

 

on a different side note: read somewhere someone mentioning something about an animation for the NPC do dance like the girls from gamorra (New Vegas) ... would love to place strong on a permanent loop of that animation on a middle of a settelment... just for morale XDD

[Athanasa]

I think you're on the wrong website for that.

[Guest deleted2588518]

I think you're on the wrong website for that.

 

Yea, pretty sure you're looking for that OTHER website.

[matzman666]

So, this made me think. The way the current food system works seems to be if FOOD >= SETTLERS then HAPPY. If you link two settlements with supplies, as far as the game is concerned it then calculates the SUM of food with SUM of settlers in the same way. But there is no storage in this. Food goes direct from the fields to settlers. There is NO benefit to growing more food than your settlers eat, except to buffer for potential new settlers. And that excess food doesn't go anywhere, because the food never WAS anywhere in the first place. PS: Please excuse my mutant pseudo-code.

 

By making FOOD a stored resource, it gains modding potential

 

Food/Water is already a stored resource (or did I missunderstand your definition of 'stored'?). The corresponding scripts calculate your daily food/water production, substract your settler's need and places the excess food/water in your workshop inventory. There IS already a benefit for growing more than you need, the excess food can be crafted into vegetable stark, which acts as an adhesive.

 

 

 

 

Settlement Supplies

This links in to the suggestion that started it all. To send supplies to a settlement, you remove food_resource from Settlement A and put it on a Brahmin to Settlement B. This depletes the food in Settlement A, making it worthwhile to have storage there, to allow you to have enough to give to a Brahmin. The caravan then travels to Settlement B and passes on their food supplies there. This also requires Settlement B to have enough storage place for the supplies, or they merely return back to Settlement A with the caravan. Because of this, there is no instant travel - there is a time where the food is out of Set A, but has not yet arrived at Set B.

This would add importance to any mods introducing attacks on caravans, or removing their invulnerability (but making them tougher than normal NPCs, probably). It would also work fabulously if any of those mods allowed you to send security with your caravans.

The settlements script already take food from settlement A and move it to settlement B. The only thing new here would be to add the brahim as man in the middle instead of directly moving food from one settlement inventory to another. I don't think that would work well with the current settlement implementation, though it's an idea worth investigating.

 

 

 

Raider Attack Modifier

I don't support the whole, "Enough defenses and raiders will never attack" thing. I'm also not a fan of raider attacks being governed by if {FOOD + WATER =< DEFENCE} then RAIDERS thing, not if there's potential for it to change. Having a high amount of stored food in your settlement would increase your chance of Raider attack. The more food, the greater the motivation for the raiders. Eventually, regardless of your defences, they hear about how much food you have and try to take some of it. A successful raider attack would take as much of your food as they can carry (maybe influenced by how many survivors they have).

 

Raider thieves may spawn as random events (or not, depending on how Raider Attacks are handled currently) and steal some of your food, although if settlers spot them doing this they will shoot them down. However, I suspect this would be harder to code modifying existing raid events.

This is already in the game. The food/water you have in your settlement inventory is already taken into account when calculating the attack probability, though there is room for improvements.

 

Accumulation

First, we need to translate the existing mechanics of Food into something useable, and into actual existing objects in the game. Every day the settlement produces a certain amount of food_resource, dictated by the food production level. Every day, your settlers consume a certain amount of food_resource. When the food production and food consumption are equal, you neither gain or lose food_resource. Your settlement can passively store up to twice (or more, configurable) the amount of food required for a day, on top of the passive daily food stocks. Further storage requires the building of specific food storage objects.

A settlement with 5 settlers and a food production of 7 will continue to store an additional 2 food_resource every day, until it reaches the storage cap. If the storage cap is double the population, it will cap out at 10 food_resource in storage (if storage is double the population). It would take the settlement 3 days to reach this cap, as all food is added at once during the day. After this point, additional food will not enter into storage and will basically disappear into the ether like food currently does - the extra 1 food_resource from day 3 will not count.

A settlement with 5 settlers, a food production of 4 and full storage could go for 5 days (losing 1 food_resource from storage per day) before they start being unable to take the required 5 food_resource from the stores to feed everyone.

As already said this is already in the game. There is even already an upper limit on how much food/water you can have in the settlement inventory before the settlement stops producing food/water.

 

Food Value

A more complex, but probably outright BETTER system than the simplistic system described above. Every food item within the game is assigned a food value. As you may have noticed, different crops in your settlements give more or less food. This would replicate that. The Food Value of a single fruit would be equal to its production value divided by the average harvest quantity, or something. Either way, values of foods are set. This applies to the Storage Fridges, which store up to a set amount of Food Value. This then means that you could then deposit any food you find in the wasteland into Storage Fridges, boosting your settlements food reserves. Wasteland food (ready meals etc) would have a very high food value in comparison to other food resources. Ideally, settlers would also tend to eat these high value foods last.

Additionally, cooked food would provide more value than its constituent parts on their own.

Bethesda currently treads all food as equal, so that's a valid point here. But there's a reason they tread all food as equal, because it is much easier to implement.

 

Harvesting

Harvesting from your farms does not affect the food resources at all, the same way it does not affect anything like that in-game currently either. It does, however, mean that you can harvest your plants then deposit your harvest into food storage (if built). On other words, you help around the settlement with the harvest and give them a boost while you're there. Yep, you can visit every single settlement to help with the harvesting to give them all a little boost.

That's already in the vanilla game.

Food Trading

So, all your settlements are churning out more food than they can possibly use. This has to be good for something right? Correct! You can trade away this food for caps. This gives long term benefits to building Food Storage within your settlements and producing more than you need, even those settlements aren't supplying other settlements. It probably isn't worth much per settlement, but if every one of your settlement is pumping out produce, the money starts to mount up. Then you can go out and spend it on resource shipments, trader stalls... or weapons for yourself.

To trade, settlers leave with a Brahmin caravan, similar to supply routes, and return with caps. Trading makes your settlers happier, and increases the recruitment boost from the radio beacons. In fact, there might be potential for your caravan to return with additional settlers seeking a new home.

That's a very good idea.

 

 

 

I myself plan also to improve the settlement system as soon as the CK is released. I suggest to join forces.

 

Edit: Somehow I broke the post's layout. No idea how I managed to do that.

Edited January 17, 2016 by matzman666

[Athanasa]

I myself plan also to improve the settlement system as soon as the CK is released. I suggest to join forces.

 

Sounds great. I was mostly dumping these ideas and hoping someone else would take them. I'm glad some of the stuff already exists in-game (I haven't looked through the code). That and I've gotten dragged off into some crazy stuff involving geology, vertibirds and Death Alternative which is draining all of my brain.