Needing to forage for cooking ingredients and/or purchase food items to heal takes a lot of time, gets tedious, and hampers my desire to explore and improve my skills at the combat system. Here’s what I would suggest changing:
-Enemies have a 100% drop chance for at least 1 basic food item. Small enemies can drop 1-3 ingredients. Tougher enemies should drop an even more ingredients along with a good food item or 2. The number of ingredients/food items can scale with the difficulty of the enemy. Really tough enemies should drop even more food items.
-Enemies can have separate drop rates for non-food items, but they should always drop some food or at least ingredients to make food at a nearby campfire.
-Consider adding rings or other gear items that increase the likelihood of enemies dropping better food items. Also consider gear items that allow reduced cooking costs/increased yield.
-Increase the number of inventory slots for food items and ingredients from the start.
EDIT: Based on people’s responses below, maybe I just need to get a little further along. I’m about 6 hours in and doing the Nameless Pass at the moment.
I got a daily quest to kill a Torn in war room, as I was new to the enemy, didn’t know when to parry, what attacks they have, so ofcourse I died a lot.
The problem is I was forced to go and farm money, to repair my gear, not only that but gather materials for healing items, I couldn’t just get good, I had to cook, chop some grass, kill crabs, I feels like a way to extend playtime.
Food not only takes time to cook, but feels absolutely useless. I almost fully abandoned cooking and using healing items, as I got a ring for healing 1hp on dealing a hit, and just like that the whole food/healing system for me is gone from the game, because it’s easier to die and learn how to fight enemy, and heal of good hits, than pointless gathering of materials
a 11 hrs player here food feels more like a problem in the begining after a bit you just get sooo much food items so its never a problem and i mostly use them on bosses now after i got a life steal item to heal
Healing is fine as it is. Foraging for food items doesn’t need to be done separately from gameplay, just do it while exploring o rdoing bounties or anything, really. I have something like 80 mushroom soups and I have trouble depleting them, specially since I’ve bought the healing rune. I’ve gotten to the point of selling food items to free space.
Maybe it’s different for late game, but as far as I am (~15hrs) healing resources are not a problem.
Yeah, 8h in, and it becomes less and less of a problem.
But when designing a game, you have to remember first 30 minutes of the game most valuable. I have seen feedback, that some one just got stack at the start, because the lost durability and have nothing to heal with. It shouldn’t be like that.
It’s not like Tree Sentinal in Elden ring, a challenge you can skip, if you’d like to. The whole mentality, that you have to suffer n-amount of hours for the game to be good is not healthy.
Maybe it wasn’t clear from previous message, but I was referring to my first 2-4 hours of the game, and it’s easier know, however start feels bad. If a player not good at sous-like games, they will die, and food being only source of healing at the Shallows, makes it discouraging to lean into the fight and get better. I rember having ton’s of mushrooms, but no grass, so I just went with it and decided to not use healing at all, down to zero? Back to whisper I go, and back into a fight.
Respawning enemies and resources is odd, can’t get it, when it happens, I was running around the Shallows looking for grass, and all I saw already gatherd spots, so no healing for me. Although after reaching Sacrement, all trees and grass was replenished, so I got some more. But it didn’t really matter, since for me food already lost it’s value, being so tedious to come around at the start
I’m like 13-14 hours in and food is not a problem at all. You pick up resources along the way and if you need some more, just buy it. Also some types of food are really good, like the health and focus combo.