Food & Water

I've seen some SE videos talking about "Food and Water", and I think that would add a whole new type of difficulty to Space Engineers. You could grow food like potatoes or something like that (like the hydroponics mod) to eat and if you don't eat about every 20 minutes (real-life time) you'd start to starve and lose health. Then for water you could find some ice on asteroids, cut a chunk outta it and bring it back to your base, melt it into water, and then eventually drink the water. And same with the food, if you don't drink you get dehydrated and lose health. I think that'd be a cool feature they should/could add to the game.

 

Yes:

• Make these as the components for a supply pack - the oxygen water & nutrition you'll need for an X period of time.
• In the GUI, have a bar showing how much you have left of your current supply pack in use, and how many more you have in your inventory.
• Add a biomass chamber (Energy intensive but simple all-in-one), hydroponics, oxygen intakes & food processors (grow your own).

Bonus 1: Using oxygen to pressurize an area or conveyor connections underneath/behind cockpits to have them fill up your supply.
bonus 2: Using biomass for cloning in the medbay.

This way you are encouraged to engineer a system humans can live in, but you aren't managing your astronaut like a sim.

 

No

The Devs have said countless times they do not intend to add food to the game(it's already bad enough I have to recharge my suit every 10 min). Food on paper is a good idea, but it would take away from building. I would like to see pressurization, but not food. Having to recharge my suit, eat, and drink..... that's getting a bit much. Even Minecraft only has you doing one thing to stay alive(food).

I would like to see water though for engines and other things. Even Eve online has you mining ice.

 

Honestly, if eating and drinking used literal real-time values for how often it must be done, then I'm all for it to add a little bit more to the game, but that would likely be in beta.

Eating every 20 minutes is just...no...eating every few hours on the other hand, as the occasional inconvenience, that's fine. Bonus points if players actually sync up the times to when they eat even though it would likely take 20s in-game and 10 minutes IRL.

Drinking is a bit more far-fetched (due to the frequency one expects), but water is just about the only substance you could reasonably claim your suit would be able to recycle with near 100% efficiency so that you wouldn't have to do it yourself (seriously, it's a simple compound). Even then, you can patch over it by merging it with eating.

 

I'm all for Nutrition Supplements being added in to suit functions. This would force you to link your Medbay and perhaps a "Dispensary block" to your inventory system, which would, when accessed(T), fill your suit's nutrition system. Granted, this seems like an extra step, but it would add in more structures that did more things, making larger stations and ships actually make more sense.

 

Where?

 

I think it would be a good idea to add food and water at some point but that would also require more resources to find and more blocks. I would like to see more curved blocks with curved windows we can build domes. The problem there would be that we would need to have them filled with air. I think it is a good option but might be too early for now or they could use this idea to start the pressurized ship sections.

 

Pressurized ship segments seems unwise to me, since it seems that more and more of the game centers around weapons and breaking ships. And since it's so easy to tear a hole in a ship's hull(And then there goes your work)...
Unless we were going to introduce plasma fields to hold air in place if a hull breach occurs, that's probably not gonna work.

 

https://blog.marekrosa.org/2014/03/space-engineers-survival-mode-update_13.html

Dat search function.

They've even said on reddit if they do add water and food it will be months. They don't intend to add this like I said. This is called Space Engineers. It's a sandbox, not a Sim. Don't get me wrong, growing food and gathering water and staying a live is a whole engineering level in its own right. But I want to worry about whats gona kill me, not how hungry I am.

Edit: Don't want to sound to condescending. It is a good idea in its own right, but this is really not the game for that kind of stuff. If they decide to do it, cool, but as of right now they need to focus on more important stuff. Like you know, actually having a server save your stuff.

 

^ That's actually quite promising.
(Meaning it's a low priority under consideration, not that it's never going to be implemented).

Exactly.

Engineering is about problem solving. Oxygen, food & water are another layer of problems to solve.

This is why I suggested above a way to implement this to seamlessly combine with the current suit energy levels - all into one supply bar. I don't want to stop for meals & send my astronaut to the bathroom, but I do want to have a reason to create a space habitat designed for humans.

 

Guys, when you say a sandbox thats ******* great go play creative... us real men want a true survival...I'm not saying every ten minutes but real time should be fine.. I mean come on its ******* survival you just don't recharge a suit and "survive"

 

nop, it's manual mode there has never been survival.

 

Survival =\= bodily functions.
You're thinking of minecraft.

 

I support the addition of food and oxygen and whatnot. They'd increase the engineering challenges of the game, which is what this game is all about.

@various "sandbox" shouting people; If you want a sandbox, play creative instead of manual.

 

If it's done right, food should absolutely be introduced.

It should take days to grow (RL Days), should require a lot of space, lots of resources, give good yield, and be something you can stretch considerably. You should likely just make it something like Algaenate, because you could use the oxygen produced by the algae for other things. We shouldn't get space chickens or something. Food production is something I've heard Nasa is already looking into, in order to substain long term trips, so it isn't outside the realm of reason. If it were to extend to trees or other things like that, it should be 110% optional. It should be LATE endgame content. That is to say, that there is a 0.0001% chance of finding tree seeds or something in a ship cargo hold. You can then use these to grow trees if you have made soil out of combing algae with gravel, have irrigation from water, sunlight, and oxygen. It should take a week or two RL to grow the thing, and should be effectively a nice cosmetic.

 

Manual =/= Survival

For those of you shouting "Survival!" Play minecraft.

 

While I'm all into immersive gameplay I don't think it would be a good idea to implement bodily needs to the game.

First of all, how would you eat? Would you have to prepare your meal, then take off your suit, sit by the table and eat your space broccoli? Or maybe you'd have to charge your food supply in a med station/cockpit just like we do now with energy? In this case it would be just two more energy bars (food and water) and I don't see a point in that.

Also, where does survival stop? If we'll have food and water should we also have to go to the toilet? Maybe sleep?

Finally, it would distract you from the core of the game, which is building stuff (both in creative and survival). You'd go out constructing a new mining station on one of the far asteroids and you'd have this thought in the back of your head saying: "you have to eat in two hours, you have to sleep soon, you need to pee". You'd concentrate more on fulfilling your bodily needs than the game itself. I remember going mad in Minecraft just because I thought I don't have enough food on me and there's nothing to eat anywhere nearby.

 

you only need to eat 2-3 times a day, waste would be done inside your suit when your re charge the suit and oxygen tanks would only need to be refilled once a day. since there are no time cycles in space you would go off a 16ish hour schedule. in sp sleep could just speed up time like in mc, there are +/- to this as well.

I think atmosphere should also be included sometime

 

I absolutely support food and water needs. How can you have a realistic game starring human astronauts when they lack basic characteristics of humanity?? Food, water, and atmosphere all add to the immersion factor; which really ultimately is what makes a game epic. When you don't really care about your astronaut or see them in any way as real; you rapidly lose interest in them or survival in general. A game where we have to engineer solutions to real problems in a futuristic space setting has the staying power to last more than the several-year lifespan of most titles; but a block-building game which basically boils down to Minecraft in space will never last.

 

Yes, but how would you eat? By charging your suit? How is it different to what we have now? The only change would be the addition of FOOD and WATER bars next to ENERGY.

Me too but for mining purposes. The ability to mine gas from the atmosphere and refine it to fuel would be great. Maybe an oxygen generator would be nice too. You could take off your suit while in a ship equipped with one so you don't have to charge up every 10 minutes if you're not sitting in the cockpit. Also, seeing all the stuff being sucked out of a damaged ship would be awesome

Lets be frank here... Space Engineers is a great game but it's not realistic (or future-realistic) at all. In case of food the only solution you'd engineer is gathering some steel plates/glass/whatever parts are needed and magically weld them into a greenhouse. What about radiation? Or the effect of zero-g environment on the growth of plants? These are the real problems of futuristic space setting, not putting a bunch of stuff together.

 

Its occured to me that there are a lot of arguments about the direction that surviving should go. I'm in the side that wants more organic strategies liek food and atmosphere, but others like the current system that I find utterly annoying. I know the devs said adding food and water etc would distract from the overall game because of having to eat, drink and sleep etc. However the suit charging is the same thing, I have to go back every few minutes to find a facility to increase a number back to 100, it stops me enjoying the survival mode.
But people going on constantly about food and pressure systems. Well why not have both systems? Why not even find a way to allow them to intersect?

Organic survival - involving food and atmosphere; Far less care is needed to maintain yourself, some care is needed to keep putting vital resources into it but the system is fragile and failures are cataclysmic. Its for operations that can be done in enclosed spaces like building small ships in a hanger, building an interior or piloting. Its purpose is just to make these small projects more efficient.

Artificial survival - pretty much what we have now. You're on life support but it allows you to get the bigger projects done. Just if you've eaten recently the drain on suit energy is far less pronounced.


keep the model of an artificial version of surviving where we charge suits and mine and efficiently fly around getting stuff done, and only have to recharge at a simple med station.
But for the other kind of player, like me who enjoys building more for purpose and having a way to advance up a natural tech tree, also have the option of moving to an organic system which may very well require less “recharging” but is incredibly fragile and can be messed up dangerously by something as simple as leaving a door open or having a small puncture. In a pressure system with oxygen producing equipment, carbon scrubbers etc you can take off your suit, grow plants, eat them (and this is far longer lasting than a suit recharge) and you’re sort of constrained to the building or ship you’re in. This is the sort of environment it would be conducive to running ship systems without needing to constantly recharge. Its also limited in that things like a refinery would likely render the atmosphere toxic because it is refining metals from their ores; so waste gasses aren’t the kind of thing you need to breathe. And it wouldn’t require a massive infrastructure if you keep it simple, for an atmosphere its two blocks; carbon scrubbers and oxygen producing equipment. Maybe remembering that the air we breathe is mostly nitrogen, a block for dispersing that. New resources, water, nitrogen and oxygen. For food, a water tank, Hydroponics lab, and a vending machine. We would even have a use for gravel as its something to grow the plants in. Seeds would arrive in freight ships as cargo.
Problem is once your atmosphere is lost, so is all life. The plants die, water evaporates and those without suits suffocate. The explosive decompression probably making the damage very extensive, the hole made much larger by the rush of air, carbon scrubbers and oxygen producing equipment should explode from the pressure differential they aren’t designed for. Gas tanks rupturing. A puncture would utterly destroy the room’s many systems that can’t deal with a vacuum. So it’s a delicate and very self-dependant system to maintain, it should even be intensive in terms of resources to set up.
But when your suit goes back on you are back to the artificial life support system so you’d have a suiting station similar to the med bay to switch between atmosphere breathing and life support. If nothing else, these blocks would make your ship less empty inside. If you’re mining and industrially producing resources you’re on life support, out on the vacuum in space. Then inside the ship you’re not on life support. You may even build a large hanger for producing ships without the constant interruption from low suit energy. Suit charging is annoying, carrying around a food bag probably isn’t. I’d like to see survival branch off into two strategies with two different approaches and purposes, and play styles.

 

Hey look another duplicate idea...USE THE SEARCH BAR ON THE SITE FOLKS...

 

if it weren't for this there would be no epic speech above you...and how are you a junior member and what is a junior member?

 

The more in a game the better, and options allows people to turn off the features they don't like, so there really is no excuse for SE not to have food in it.
Better for everyone.
As the game gets older and older sooner or later we will get food introduced.
Like Minecraft we will end up with over 500 items in the menu for building, and that is a great thing.
The developers also said no decorative blocks when they started SE last year, and now we have the internal wall block, serves no purpose but is decorative, so NEVER SAY NEVER !

Food is a must for SE, and a shop and economy would be good too, where you can buy and sell recourses, only adds to the game, trade with AI generated enemies, AI generated factions, eventually we will likely get whole pc generated faction empire enemies, give the game a few years see where it goes. Has incredible potential.

Really just depends on how daring the developers are and how far they want to push it.

 

There is one more reason why bodily needs shouldn't be introduced to SE and it is the fact, that no game ever has done it right.

Let's concentrate on eating and let's say you have to eat every 4 hours both in real life and in the game. In real life you'd eat your breakfast at, say, 6 a.m. After that you'd have to eat at 10 a.m. But what if you won't eat at that time? Mostly nothing will happen. You won't feel bad and most definately you won't die. You'll just grab something to eat later during the day. Most people can go on without food for hours without negative impact on themselves, especially if they're occupied with something important. I start my work at 6:30 a.m. and if there's much to do I don't think about eating till late afternoon ar evening. You can also have a large breakfast to supply you with energy for the entire day.

Games don't work that way. It's a 0/1 system. Either the character is hungry or isn't or, in other words: your "food bar" is either full or empty. If it's empty you start facing consequences: if there are attributes you suffer a penalty to your stats, like your strenght goes a few points down or your health starts to decrease. This is because a game can't simulate a living organism. It doesn't take into consideration factors like stress or priorities that can "cut off" thinking about your body.

Imagine a situation in which you are escaping from pirates in your mining ship. You ate four hours ago and your food bar reaches 0%. Since SE doesn't have attributes (and it doesn't need them IMHO) you start losing health. In a few minutes you're dead. In real life the adrenaline boost would be so big you'd stop feeling hunger, the need for sleep or anything else. All you'd think about would be escaping and surviving. Granted, you'd probably feel exhausted afterwards but it won't happen in game. You'll just die because you didn't have food with you.

That's why, in my opinion, bodily needs would just be a source of frustration, not immersion.

Also, where does immersion end? If you want eating, drinking and sleeping because it's realistic then why not have money and costs of operations? Why not start the game on a planet and having to develop a space program? Building space ships doesn't work in a way that you weld stuff together. You have to research, test, develop. You'd spend more time at a virtual desk and not in space playing around with your designs. And suddenly... POW! We have Kerbal Space Program, which isn't completely bad but we've already got it so why bother with Space Engineers.

 

question why not just the option of food. eating food or water extends your battery charge. full food and water double your battery and not having food or water keeps it the same. assuming the suit is keeping us alive now adding food and water to the mix would just reduce the drain on the batteries.

 

I'd like to see this, but it will undoubtedly be as a mod, not a stock part of the game.

 

Make it that it's always 1, then. Have a constantly growing hunger and thirst bars, and constantly decrease health by their values (with hunger completely filling up in 24 hours, and thirst in 6 hours, being much more draining). If you take no action, you could die of dehydration in 3 days, or of weakness in a couple of weeks (it's not the feeling of hunger or thirst that kill you, but their effects).
If you go to a medical facility, it could reduce the bars though IV feed, but only to a minimum of half their maximum range (you don't get a belly full of reserves, only what your body requires immediately).

It doesn't represent hunger weakness, since we don't have character stats, but it's much more realistic this way. Optionally, throw ultra-realism out the window and make the effects quicker (12 hours for thirst, and 3 days for hunger); this will make players pay more attention to such things.

 

Hunger shouldn't be a system that kills you. I tend to agree with people on that. Having food boost you would be better. That way you aren't dieing because of hunger, and you don't have to participate if you don't want, but you wont be operating at 100% if you don't.

As to the how, Nutrien packs. It's either going into you with an IV, or you have a tube in your space helmet.

Problems solved.

 

For me, the goal isn't immersion or realism, it's having the emergent need to engineer your own life support system. It's creating an air recycling system, it's mining for ice, it's building hydroponics, it's taking care of your resources.

As far as managing consumption and needs, just have it all in one bar - life support. Each life support module takes all the resources you need for a certain period of time, and the player will be presented with a bar showing how much they have left of their current unit, and how many more units they have in their inventory (Just assume your suit is injecting the nutrition directly into your blood stream). The cause of death isn't going to be dying from starvation in 4 hours, it will be the lack of oxygen.

I don't object to a more advanced system alongside that - you could color code different sections of the bar to mean different supply items. If your hanging out in space it wouldn't matter, because the life support module is designed so that the percentage of each bar would decrease in the exact same rate, but it would enable alternatives for habitable ship areas, so that your oxygen bar doesn't decrease in a pressurized environment, or filling up the food bar by consuming a tomato from the hydroponic bay. You should also be able to connect your cockpit to the conveyor system to draw in life support items from the conveyor system to not have to worry about it mid flight (In fact in such a situation it could fill the life support bar just like it fills your energy bar).