Food Buffs Should Be Stackable - Change My Mind ☕

Suggestions
1

Sorry about the silly meme in the topic title. :stuck_out_tongue: Anyway, I think that food buffs should stack for several reasons.

1.) It would boost the economy because people would consider buying all the food types.

Nobody buys anything except Teaching Pies and Persisting Pies. The atmospheric protection foods are basically useless. Think about it: the only time you would use atmospheric protection foods is to gain access to high tier planets. However, those same planets require the use of expensive gear and most people seem to prefer using a Persisting Pie to get the most out of those tools. And so people tend to invest the skill points into atmosphere protection instead of buying the atmosphere protection foods. If it were possible to super-buff yourself, then I think that more people would consider buying a whole suite of foods before going on their adventures on high-tier planets.

2.) The current system is counter-intuitive, especially with the Well Fed buff.

I have, on more than one occasion, accidentally blown away a Teaching Pie buff by eating an Earthyam Stew. Wanting to keep my character Well Fed seems like such a natural thing to do. I don’t want to be constantly nibbling on Cooked Earthyams like some kind of peasant. Eating a quick stew is almost automatic because I want to prevent my character from getting tired so easily. But you have to be very careful not to do this if you’ve decided to use another buff. Furthermore, it seems really weird that a luxury food like a Teaching Pie would be less effective at keeping my character Well Fed than a cheap Earthyam Stew.

3.) It could reduce the reliance on alt characters.

I wish that I didn’t have to use an alt character. It doesn’t seem like the way the game was intended to be played. My main character is sort of an all-rounder, I think, with a bit of a bias towards mining and gathering. I haven’t thought too seriously about optimizing the skill points perfectly for some particular task. My character is not well suited to slaying wildlife on high-tier worlds. It would be great to be able to buff myself for a hunting adventure by eating Invigorating food, eating Energizing food, eating an appropriate Shielding food, and be able to keep myself Well Fed at the same time. (And, to reinforce my point 1 above: If this were an option, I think that people would buy a lot more foods, which would make it actually worth having a seriously well-stocked food shop.)

Are there any reasons why food buffs shouldn’t stack?

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2

you raise some very good points!

although i do think there should be a limit, it just shouldn’t be 1. it would be a little too OP if one could eat one of every food and incur every food buff possible
taking a page from the guild buffs I think a good max would be 3.

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Completely agree, the first time I tried eating multiple foods and noticed they didn’t stack ruined it for me, I gave up on them after that and only make shielding loafs.

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Totally agree. This is supposed to be BOUNDLESS ffs ! (For flip sake)

At the very minimum we should be able to stack a normal food buff with one other. And I agree that 3 or so would be much better and not OP (because let’s face it teaching or persisting pie makes up 99% of what people use)

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1 - Good meme xD
2 - Maybe dont keep it unlimited and dont limit it to a specific absolute number but rather, limit it by some sort of points. A very rough example: players have 10 food points and 10 drink points at a time where lvl 5 drink/pies give 5 points and Lvl 4 drink/loaves give 4 and etc. Then, players have to balance eating less high tier foods/drinks or more lower tier foods/drinks? Just an idea.
I believe this stacking issue aaand augments need some reconsideration but thats just me. Sorry for the rough post - in a hurry xD

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6

Yep, I mentioned this a few times before too, brews have categories that allow you to use more than 1, the instant ones work along a long lasting one AND the reviver brew which is also long lasting.

I proposed 3 categories:

  • like instant brews any of the foods that only give well fed should be in this category
  • teaching and persisting could be the long lasting variants of reviver brews
  • all the other food types that give something extra which ALSO can be found in your skill tree would be the 3rd

All working nicely together, like brews.

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7

I’ll grant that those categories seem sensible but I’m not convinced they’re necessary or even desirable. They’d probably just complicate matters and make the game less intuitive and require more explaining. Besides, I’m interested in allowing lower level players (or players like myself with all-rounder characters) to be able to eat a whole bunch of foods before going on a dangerous hunting adventure. Example:

  • Invigorating food to help with not having a lot of points in Vitality
  • Energizing food to help with not having a lot of points in Zeal (or having chosen to go with the Energy Regeneration Epic in lieu of lots of Zeal)
  • Shielding food to protect against the negative status effects that the high-tier wildlife will give you
  • Criticaling food to help with not having a lot of points in Agility
  • Atmospheric Protection food to get into the danger zone in the first place

These would all fall into your third category but I would want to eat all of them at the same time.

8

I like that the food and brew buff slots overwrite, makes you have to make a build choice. I’ve played games where lots of consumable buffs stack and you end up having to always juggle N foods in your inventory to play the game efficiently. Constraints are good in this area.

I do however think all the foods could give the well fed buff in addition to whatever else they’re doing. I agree that worrying about max energy drain is tedious. It feels like all the well fed buff does is help you avoid being punished by the game, rather than offering you a benefit. But then it punishes you anyway, cuz now your food slot is taken.

2 Likes
9

We will need them over the persisting/teaching pie when the new tier of planet will come out.

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10

Food buffs not stacking forces you to make a decision. What is more important to you, not having to stop and eat some cooked meat every once and awhile, your tool lasting longer, using those skill points in something besides environment protection, or gaining extra Xp (etc.).

It can be inconvenient to have to keep eating while your mining with a persisting pie, but that is the trade off of having longer lasting tools.

The idea of boundless isn’t to make you have the ability to do everything all the time. That would make for a very boring game in the long term, as your decisions no longer have any weight. When everything becomes an option then the “correct way” to play is to use everything all the time.

I’m against stacking even only 2 or 3 buffs for this same reason, Now I feel like I am sub-optimal because I need to balance 3 buffs in order to operate at max performance. A lot of games reduced the number of buffs when they used to let you stack a whole bunch of them. Why? because the game should be (and I believe it is) balanced around you having NO buffs, and then the buff actually gives you an advantage (and lives up to the name of Buff). If you can have multiple Buffs, is it still fair to balance the game around NO buffs, or should you balance around 1 or 2?

Instead of bringing the less desirable buffs up, this line of thinking actually brings the value of the other buffs down closer to their level. The argument would then be “why not just have XP and Persisting buffs standard into our characters? I mean it is boundless right?”

This is why Food buffs should 100% be left un-stackable. Now environment buffs could be made slightly more powerful, such as giving you a chance to resist damage in that environment, or allowing you to move faster in that atmosphere. That would be how you make them more desirable and a more interesting choice, not by letting you have more buffs in general.

Currently we have a Brew buff, a Food buff, and 3 guild buffs. I honestly think that we have enough options for buffs at one time, if not too many.

1 Like
11

Wouldn’t persisting fall under the 3rd category since you can get the durability epic?

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We are still fine on t7 planets but t8+ we will need protection foods the last two points of protection count as two each so 7 total then the food will boost that to 10 allowing us to access brutal planets

13

I completely understand why you would want this :

But that would break hunting. I’ll use my hunters build as an example. I have max Hp (12,000hp), full armor and resistance skills as well as protection epic (armor: 450 / resistance :50% ) and rage. I can increase my hp to 24,000 with invigorating pie and with bleeding edge quirk that goes up to 27,600hp. So if i was able to use shielding food as well , i would have an armor of 550 and resistance of 75% and i can increase that each time i gain a higher level of rage.

Here is the fun part, an elite wildstock does about 8,000 dmg so not only can i take 4 hits before dying instead of 1 but with the shielding pie there is a chance to completely resist/repel the damage. Add in the rage skill, i would only need lvl 5 rage to be immune to elite wildstocks for 90 secs which i can get easily since with shielding and invigorating pie i wont have a problem building the rage up. (Rage is built by taking hits)

The way the game is right now, i would not be able to build up a suficient amount of rage from an elite wildstock to become immune to them since they hit too bloody hard :sob:. I usually use shielding pies so i would only have 15,600hp (max hp skills + bleeding edge) which means i can only afford one hit from an elite wild and that’s far from enough to build suficient rage so i cry when I get touched…

Stacking these foods would make hunting very unbalanced. I could add on top of invigorating and shileding; criticalling foods to my build since i use gold fist and not only am i very hard to kill but i hit even harder. The wildstocks wouldnt stand a chance and this is not including other brew buffs. This would also dilute the “class”.
In hindsight, I probably could have just said it would make hunters OP…

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14

But people circumvent having to make that decision in any case by using alt characters.

But you can fit 9 different types of cooked food items in 1 inventory slot. No need to worry about wasting space in your inventory.

I agree with the concept of not being able to do everything all the time, and Boundless’s skill system is set up so that you can’t ever get enough skill points into 1 page to do everything perfectly. In fact, in the description on the Steam store page for Boundless, it asks the question: “Explorer? Builder? Hunter? Trader? Crafter? Make your own path.”

But let’s be honest, people more-or-less circumvent this by having multiple characters. The idea that one player will choose to be a lifelong crafter/shopowner while another player will choose to be a lifelong hunter/gatherer is a pipe dream. Most people want to try it all and so these skillset limitations are overcome by having one or more alt characters.

But what if there was a less contrived way of being able to do everything? How 'bout food buffs? This would not be “all the time” because food buffs don’t last forever. You would still have to make the choice to spend your money on those foods.

Nah, it’s good that you explained it because I probably wouldn’t have taken your post seriously if it only contained a one-line assertion.

@RedY3 posted a pretty good suggestion for how to limit things if being overpowered is really a concern:

Based on the maths I’m seeing in this suggestion, it looks like you could eat 2 pies with your 10 points. But perhaps the Pie-level buffs should still be limited to 1 only. The lower-level foods could be the ones that could stack.

After looking around at the percentage gains of a few of the foods, it looks like there are differences between the different types of foods in terms of how those percentages ‘ramp up’ with each food level. So, in the proposed 10 point system, the translation to points could be implemented something like this:

Teaching Pie: 100% increase: 10 points
Teaching Loaf: 50% increase: 5 points
Teaching Pudding: 20% increase: 2 points
Teaching Porridge: 10% increase: 1 point

Invigorating Pie: 100% increase: 10 points
Invigorating Loaf: 80% increase: 8 points
Invigorating Porridge: 60% increase: 6 points
Invigorating Stew: 40% increase: 4 points
Invigorating Soup: 20% increase: 2 points

So, with a system like this, you could eat a Teaching Pudding (2 points) and an Invigorating Loaf (8 points) at the same time. If you ate a Teaching Pie (10 points) and then ate an Invigorating Stew (4 points), it would not overwrite the whole Teaching buff. Instead, it would replace 4 of your points with the Invigorating buff leaving you with 6 points of Teaching buff. Also, the system could be programmed to prefer overwriting buffs that have less time remaining.

A system like this would make the lower level foods much more valuable. Currently, there are lots of players who are serious about “optimizing” the way they play so anything less than the highest level of food is out of the question. With a system like this, the choices would become even more interesting as you could decide on the ratio of each buff that you want to have.

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15

Yes, true. When I posted it previously I didn’t equate the category to skill points, hehe, but there’s still something to say for it I suppose since people do want both that epic skill AND still eat the persisting while with the others the need to do both seems way less.

Those type of categoties are already in game. Granted, quite a few people didn’t even know brew and food buffs worked side by side let alone that drinking a Reviver brew had no effect on any of the brew buffs either.

I don’t think I’m a fan of unlimited stacking of food (and then thus brew too since why do it for one set of buffs, but not the other?) buffs but what would be possible is something like:

  • up to level 20 as many at the same from the category that also represent skills
  • level 20 to 30, max of 3
  • level 30 to 40, max of 2
  • level 40+, then they should have enuff skill points to have to be able to do it with 1

If we can endless stack the food/brew buffs that are like certain skills then the skills might as well be removed from the skill tree altogether.

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Overwriting a percentage of the buff is a good idea! Might not work with absolute buffs like well-fed :thinking: unless it shortens the well fed timer by a percentage.

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The idea is that players will use skill pages to do other jobs. A lot of the jobs overlap so by the time you reached lvl 100 and filled out three pages you can competently do most of everything, even if you are only able to be a master in 3 things (due to the either-or skills). This approach leaves gaps along the journey, hence the devs’ decision to give free skill rewrites until lvl 20 and a liberal drip of cleanse points throughout. I think alts are still more convenient, mostly because characters can easily share XP and abuse uncapped scaling via teaching pie, but I digress.

The alt system is a blight on this game which will forever haunt every balance discussion. One side effect is that it makes players comfortable with having all skills readily at their fingertips with little trade-off. They then start to perceive the single character progression as limited and offer suggestions to make single chars more powerful. This is a line of thought which leads to power creep. Even with alts we aren’t allowed currently to stack buffs to such degree, so this change is a net increase in individual power (in addition to expanding character possibilities.)

The use case where my miner character eats a bunch of food to become a hunter is the pipe dream. In reality players will still switch to their hunter alts and then stack food as described in a previous reply to reach unprecedented levels of power. This will eventually lead to the devs balancing for multi food builds creating a larger gap between the haves and have nots.

My central issue with the suggestion is that it has its heart in the right place–namely giving people a way to do stuff without resorting to alt abuse–but also opens a new source of power creep. And other elements of it like moving well fed buff out of the food buff slot I think could be a positive change as well.

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18

You can’t play multiple characters at the same time, but having all the buffs would more or less allow you to “play” multiple skill sets at the same time.

I see no reason we need more buffs, we already can have up to 5 active at a time in the current system.

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