Early game in BTW with HC Hunger

[Six]

The hunger and food changes from the recent update have a pretty huge impact on the early game for BTW, I'm interested to hear how people have been coping (or not coping as the case may be) with getting through the early game.

As I see it, fishing and killing wild animals seems to be the best way for early food. However fishing requires you to kill spiders, which is a hunger and health risk in itself, and animals aren't very sustainable till you find wheat. Pig breeding might be viable for a temporary food source, but again requires you to kill skeletons, zombies and find some reeds (EDIT: As pointed out by Elevatator, I forgot you need a stoked cauldron for this, so while you can do it before finding a village it is hardly 'early game'). Really, it seems exploring your land has become far more important now early on, and you will love those villagers even more when you finally find them.

So what stories have come out for people with these changes, and how have people found themselves trying to get by?

[ion]

fishing and killing animals is the way to go until you have a good amount of food for traveling. finding a village is very important now as there is no way to have wheat in good amounts. even then wheat farming is tedious as the seed drops are nerfed. ( may be better with some fortune tools).
i did found a village and killed them all. see the picture why.

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[Elevatator]

Pig Breeding? Doesn't Kibble require a Hibachi? It's not early game, I think.
However, I think pumpkins are a good food for the beginning. You have to find some first, but they are reliable.

p.s.: When I made my pumpkin field, Steve started/tried to eat them, wich fitted perfectly into the athmosphere of the new release.

[Six]

Pig Breeding? Doesn't Kibble require a Hibachi? It's not early game, I think.
However, I think pumpkins are a good food for the beginning. You have to find some first, but they are reliable.

p.s.: When I made my pumpkin field, Steve started/tried to eat them, wich fitted perfectly into the athmosphere of the new release.

Oops, forgot about the need for a stoked flame there. Fishing it is, or finding pumpkins.

[EpicAaron]

This update certainly makes Hardcore Spawn much harder to use in singleplayer, since exploration from the spawn is now very important in the early game.

[Marasambala]

After messing around a bit, I figured out that being fat is a pretty good deal if you're going mining. So I thought more must be better. Wrong. Not only does obesity slow you down walking AND mining. Steve has a hard time breathing and its freaking annoying.

Well played, FC, well played.


Fuck, man! Then injured, wounded, and crippled.

...aaaand while I'm typing this I got craped on a server with very little wildlife. Thank you so much.

[ion]

really game, really!

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no crops again!
OT pumpkins and chickens give you eggs and some meal and some easy tier 2 foods

[TaterBoy]

I decided to go mega-hardcore with my first attempt, and it worked out pretty well, I selected Large Biomes, and turned on Hardcore Spawn. Luck was in my favor, as I managed to spawn very close to a village with pigs, chickens, and cows all spawning within village limits. It's still a very hard climb, and full of tension as I try to build my starting resources and obtain a reasonable amount of food...The days seem shorter, and the nights seem longer, but that will probably chance once I can get a tree farm going and can fence in and light up the village.
So far, so good, I absolutely love that food is no longer just an annoying incidental, and actually part of the game-play experience...After all, where is the challenge to survive if the only challenge is just a matter of remembering to hold down the RMB every now and then?

[Mud]

I was waiting for the addition of HCH to start a fresh world and I'm really pleased with the level of challenge it brings to the game (I'm even more excited to see it in conjunction with the AI updates in VMC1.5.x) Keeping myself from starving to death is easy enough, but the nerfs to healing as well as the negative effects that come with health lose are brutal.

I should mention my preferred playing style is gather wood and food during my first day, and start spelunking my first night, continuing this practice until my inventory fills at which point I set out to built a small house for storage. 2 RL days and 4 worlds later and I've only managed to get to the house-building stage once.

Today I experienced the "dying" health effect for the first time. That was something.

[Solymr]

I'm going to voice my opinion with the new features:

First of all, I appreciate the challenges provided since you need to build carrot, potato, wheat, pumpkin, melon and cocoa farms to have every food choice available and be able to have your hunger and fat under your control.
But trying to find the first of those items is given away to being lucky and finding a village that actually has the crops before going apeshit because the world generator decided completely out of your control and knowledge that the villages you find are composed of one damn house and nothing more.
Compare this to strongholds: also important, you'd expect them to be harder to find than some village. But you can find one just by following eyes of ender, and they're conveniently placed in a triangle around your original spawn.
It's very frustrating and disencouraging that finding a stronghold (which isn't even needed to get to the endgame of BTW) is more trivial than finding a village, which you must do if you want to get a reliable food industry going. Even Groth spores have an alternate method to create other than finding a very rare biome and taking a piece of it with you.

I also like the new hunger and fat effects, since before you could just ignore your hunger until you couldn't sprint or needed to heal.
But the health effects are just plain frustrating and dooming because in the early game you can't heal yourself quickly enough to survive the situation.

Here's what happened when I created a new world with the last version installed:
By some bullshit luck I happened to spawn next to a village. I immediatly thought that the biggest early game problem was pretty much solved. No wheat though, but I thought with the carrots and the pigs I'd have enough to go. I also found an iron sword, some iron and bread, and I made some sandvich. Night came, and mobs came with it, and after dawn I went to start the real deal, expecting the sun to clear up the undead and ignoring the rest, and it happened.
A skeleton hiding beneath the little overhangs of the house sniped me, and left me crippled. Just out of reach of my sword, I couldn't fight or run away, regeneration was too slow and being my first night I didn't have any armor or any way to heal myself or shoot him.
I died and I respawned far away. The fact that I couldn't do anything to save myself from that unlucky situation and that I would have to look again for a village I wasn't even sure I could find before I stop giving a shit about what happened quickly disencouraged me from playing anymore.

It seems like surviving the early game depends more on your luck of finding a village and other things than on your skills, planning and wits. That isn't challenging, it's frustrating and very disencouraging.

[ion]

really Solymr! you survive just fine without finding a village
food is easy to get by hunting and farming also
chickens are still farmable with seeds also you did forget obout fishing, but maybe just waste some time reading this very thread

[Solymr]

Maybe but those options leave you very limited, you would have to spend most of your time fishing, since cooked fish doesn't restore as much hunger now, and you need to get threads to make them, which is either dangerous for having to fight spiders or dangerous for having to look underground for webs and risking yourself to die from mobs or starvation, it's a vicious cycle.
As for farming chickens, you would need seeds for that, and the only seeds you get without a village or pumpkins or melons are hemp seeds, which are hard to find, and since the seed dropping rate from grown plants has been reduced, you'd have to spend the same most of your time finding seeds and farming them for food that, same as fish, doesn't restore as much hunger as before because you can't combine it.

[DaveYanakov]

Mushrooms are also completely viable as a food source now. You no longer need to find both varieties just to start eating your stockpile and they are very easy to farm.

Food is all around you if you are wiling to look a bit an explore your options. Aside from cactus not being edible, I cannot think of a biome where you will not find something edible to sustain your search for better.

I am very sorry that the mod got challenging gameplay in your building block toy.

[Graphite]

I am very sorry that the mod got challenging gameplay in your building block toy.

Was that remark really necessary?

Anyhow, Flowerchild has mentioned that odds were good that the balance for all this still needed to be tweaked once he got some data from others. How is he going to know what people think if all he hears is "hail FC!" while the rest gets silenced? If someone feels that hardcore hunger is unbalanced, then let that person speak his piece and give FC a chance to determine whether it's a valid concern or not.

[Solymr]

Mushrooms are also completely viable as a food source now. You no longer need to find both varieties just to start eating your stockpile and they are very easy to farm.

Same as for fish and seeds, you still can't make higher tier food with just those. And their growth is too random to be reliable in a tight situation

Food is all around you if you are wiling to look a bit an explore your options. Aside from cactus not being edible, I cannot think of a biome where you will not find something edible to sustain your search for better.

I don't think any of those food sources are viable for establishing down a base and start building automated farms, like it has been encouraged to do until now. You'd have to be a nomad, unable to advance through the tech tree until you are LUCKY enough to find the crops. I don't like having to be lucky to start advancing on the tech tree, simply because the food sources before finding a village are not enough to sustain yourself when building a base and digging down.

I am very sorry that the mod got challenging gameplay in your building block toy.

No need to be disrespectful like that. I only expressed my opinion and I like challenging, if it's a challenge to my mind, not my luck. Depending on being lucky to advance makes it frustrating and disencourages starting over.
If you want to shut my arguments down, do so without being condescending or let the higher powers do it.

[Sarudak]

I think there is a valid point in how much things are feast or famine depending on if you get an early village or not. I know the first game I tried I got an early village and it felt kinda like I cheated and got a free pass through the early game. I'm really liking most of the changes so far, I have some reservations but I want to give everything a thorough play through before I offer any critique/suggestions. Overall I think this is a huge improvement to the game any way you slice it.

[Mud]

• Fishing grants you access to an unlimited food source early on.
• Chickens can still be domesticated with seeds, providing eggs and meat.
• Wild Cows, Pigs, Sheep, and Wolves still provide an unlimited food source via natural respawning.
• On average, I typically find 3-4 villages spawn in a 128x128 Chunk area when playing a Default World type. (This number is about the same in a Large Biomes world as well assuming one of the dominant biomes is Plains or Desert)

Higher Tier foods are just like SFS; they make things easier, but are not mandatory for survival, and with enough time investment you'll acquire the resources necessary to have both.

If all else fails

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You can always one of the 1,000,000 village spawn seeds out there.

Despite getting ready to start my 5th world since the new release, my opinion of HCH gets more positive as I further discover what it brings to the game. Exploration and combat especially are no longer trivial matters and through HCH the game feels more like a true survival game.

Also on the note about being unable to eat when poisoned; assuming a pale of milk still cures poison, HCH has sudden made an item I literally have never used now very useful.

[Simurgh]

I started a new world, as playing my existing world kinda felt like cheating as I already had all crops and a nice varied selection of foods and I felt I'd be missing out on the HcH "experience".

So far any game I've started has been me living as a nomad, randomly killing stray animals and holing up every night cooking my meat. I expect this will continue until I get some kind of reliably sustainable foodstuff - i.e a village, or I die.

The skill/time required to get off the ground and onto the tech tree (or even establishing a base) is a lot higher now.

[Mud]

I started a new world, as playing my existing world kinda felt like cheating as I already had all crops and a nice varied selection of foods and I felt I'd be missing out on the HcH "experience".

So far any game I've started has been me living as a nomad, randomly killing stray animals and holing up every night cooking my meat. I expect this will continue until I get some kind of reliably sustainable foodstuff - i.e a village, or I die.

The skill/time required to get off the ground and onto the tech tree (or even establishing a base) is a lot higher now.

You can domesticate chickens early on. And a crude shelter on a shoreline facing open water would allow you to spend your evenings fishing as well. Just a thought.

[SpaceGuyR]

The only issue is that since saturation on the first day has been removed, you're thrown straight into it and get 'Hungry' by the first night.

Having started a new world with the update, I've found (died and spawned in sight of) two villages and a jungle temple. If I can get enough together in one place (hiding in a lit up house overnight still uses resources now) there's all three village foods, pumpkins, chickens and pigs very close by.

[Kaitocain]

A bit of a curious question, but can you use Hemp Seeds to domesticate chickens?

I do agree that the finding of villages for crops (outside of hemp) is a bit hit or miss, but otherwise I find the entire challange of HCH to be absolutely invigorating. Makes Minecraft a game I wanna play again.

[Mud]

A bit of a curious question, but can you use Hemp Seeds to domesticate chickens?

I do agree that the finding of villages for crops (outside of hemp) is a bit hit or miss, but otherwise I find the entire challange of HCH to be absolutely invigorating. Makes Minecraft a game I wanna play again.

You can use all seed types.

[Shengji]

Thought this may be of interest to you guys, it's a map of my new world with some notes on it.

Warning, large picture

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Don't worry, my friend made the map and censored any spoilers. What has been presented here is so well trodden for me, it is fully committed to memory!

[Kazuya Mishima]

So I started a new game just to see how the hardcore hunger feels early game. I will likely go back to my old game with all my automated systems but I just had to take HH for a spin as I really love survival games and that first night experience.

I found myself on a jungle island. I made my way across it the first day and killed every chicken in sight.

The first night I cooked chicken meat on the coast with my back to the ocean and then jumped in a boat and found the beginnings of a tundra landmass. I Killed lots of sheep that were herding on the coast and desperately raced to kill a loner that was being pursued by a wolf. I got the kill and stole the feral canine’s dinner. Eventually I would retreat back into the sea because of two creepers, I would make a temporary base camp in an atoll not far from the shore line of ungulate massacre.
On the second day I would find 2 things that lifted my mood, 2 brown shrooms and 3 pumpkins. My initial goal was to try to find a village but upon getting the pumpkins I realized I now had an early game renewable food source.

The second night was spent cooking well over 16 lamb shanks and at this point, despite starting a new world with no body fat, I was beginning to put on small amounts of adipose appropriate for a cold, snowy environment of the tundra.

I decided against aimlessly wandering looking for wheat. I returned to the initial jungle island and as luck would have it there were still plenty of chickens on the island willing to follow me for seeds. By the third day I had a small chicken pen about 5 or 6 pumpkin seeds. As a lot of others are observing pumpkins seem to be the goto sustainable food early game unless you get super lucky and spawn near a village

By the third morning I killed a spider and got two string. The promise of fish induced me to construct a rather large pier over the sea.

By the fifth day I was sustainable and had a small pumpkin patch going. Maybe by the 20th I was plump and still had plenty of cooked lamb left.

As an added bonus during my travels for food I made about 3 or 4 vanilla stone furnaces and left them behind at temporary base camps. The stone furnaces took on the properties of a fire-pit given that they are so cheap they really don’t deserve status other than the rather worthless item they are. In this sense the furnace took on more of an authentic role for its purpose. The vanilla items became evidence of a abandoned campsite somebody needed to use to cook food rather than a 8 cobble machine that can bake bread, cook all categories of meat, transform clay into brick, nether-rack into netherbrick(1.5) and even more miraculously provides a means to melt metals and cast them into ingots, not to mention they serve as an engine for moving minecarts.

In my main world I still have the first furnace I’ve ever built which seems like heresy for such a cheap item. I use an auto kiln to smelt all my ingots now or a cauldron to cook all my food except bread.

Anyway I finally died when I breached a mine shaft and went exploring. I found melon seeds almost immediately but a zombie injured me. I dispatched him but was impatient and wanted to explore so I pressed on further into the tunnels in a “hurt” state and a skeleton came around the corner and got in 1 shot. I got into cover but by then I was in some sort of critical condition he rounded the corner and hit me again. My iron sword was ready and I’m certain I hit him about 10 times with the blade, pinning him against the stone wall but I was so weakened by the initial 2 arrows I might as well have been hitting him with an egg.

This brings back memories of my first experience with vanilla way before the Halloween update when I was too terrified to venture into the tunnels. This is without a doubt the best BTW update so far, thanks Flowerchild. You’ve managed to enhance the value of so many useless vanilla objects.
Also for those who aren’t happy with the early game it may indeed get a little easier as I recall Flowerchild remarking that he might add unprocessed sugar cane as a dessert item. These are easy to harvest and plant.

[Gabecraft1234]

How did you generate this map?