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Remove Butchering, Just Drop Chunks

PostPosted: Friday, 1st November 2019, 23:11
by Shtopit
Nowadays, you cannot chop inedible corpses, and you are not chopping up the dead before they rise again, because monsters don't cast simulacrum or animate dead any more. As far as I can tell, butchering has only two in-game effects:

  • losing some auts
  • necromancers have to choose between food and servants

I don't think that this is enough to force everyone to chop corpses before eating, often forcing two or more keypresses, especially since permanent undead are mostly gone (Yred zombies are permanent, but cannot regenerate). It would be better if monsters simply dropped chunks as items when they die, like how dragons now simply drop their scales. If free chunks would be too good for necromancers, spells and abilities that create undead from corpses could simply get a higher hunger cost.

Re: Remove Butchering, Just Drop Chunks

PostPosted: Saturday, 2nd November 2019, 02:53
by bel
Proposal looks ok. I think some variant has been proposed before.

My preferred solution would be to remove chunks/nutrition from corpses altogether. Chunks are mostly important for countering spell hunger -- this problem can be fixed by removing spell hunger.

While we're on the topic, can the silly "poisonous corpses are inedible" commit be reverted already? It's been 4.5 years of completely pointless nuisance. Either move to true "chunkless" crawl, or revert the damn thing.

[Of course, it's preferable to remove food altogether; but since some kind of clock is desirable, one can start with removing the most superficial and pointless aspects of food.]

Re: Remove Butchering, Just Drop Chunks

PostPosted: Saturday, 2nd November 2019, 13:20
by petercordia
I agree that removing chunks & spell hunger would make most games smoother & nicer.

I rather like the lore of Trolls, Felids, Kobolds & Gouls hunting&eating all the citizens of the dungeon though, and chunks also interact with berserk & god abilities. Maybe allowing chunks to be eaten only with gourmand would be a nice way to do it.

Re: Remove Butchering, Just Drop Chunks

PostPosted: Sunday, 3rd November 2019, 21:10
by Klown
Completely agree. Playing troll is so boring because I have to chop up a corpse every 5 seconds or he's starving again. It'd be much easier if the chunks simply showed up in my inventory after auto-traveling.

bel wrote:[Of course, it's preferable to remove food altogether; but since some kind of clock is desirable]


If the devs thought a food clock was necessary, the mummy & 0.24 vampire wouldn't exist.

Get rid of it and fix the underlying issues that made a 'food clock' required in the first place.

Re: Remove Butchering, Just Drop Chunks

PostPosted: Sunday, 3rd November 2019, 21:15
by petercordia
Klown wrote:Completely agree. Playing troll is so boring because I have to chop up a corpse every 5 seconds or he's starving again. It'd be much easier if the chunks simply showed up in my inventory after auto-traveling.


If you set "auto_butcher = true" in the rcfile, chunks do just show up in your inventory after auto-travel.

I guess this isn't the default option because necromancers don't want to auto_butcher, and dropping chunks in addition to corpses would get rid of that.

Re: Remove Butchering, Just Drop Chunks

PostPosted: Monday, 4th November 2019, 03:02
by bel
Klown wrote:
bel wrote:[Of course, it's preferable to remove food altogether; but since some kind of clock is desirable]


If the devs thought a food clock was necessary, the mummy & 0.24 vampire wouldn't exist.


This is a larger point which is hard to discuss in this thread, but some general comments.

I think that the exception proves the rule here. Most species do have a food clock; two of them don't. Besides, clock-like mechanisms (like piety decay) exist elsewhere.

I think there should be a clock in general: it's good for gameplay. Personally, I don't particularly care about Mummy (I don't play it), but Vp should have some kind of clock. Food obviously doesn't work. But that's just a reason to have a functional one which does work.

Re: Remove Butchering, Just Drop Chunks

PostPosted: Monday, 4th November 2019, 12:44
by tealizard
If you're going to remove butchering, why not also remove corpses? This was done in hellcrawl by making spells that interact with corpses into sustained duration spells. Obviously, that's not as good an option in dcss because there are no mechanics for handling general durations sensibly, but they could be made into god abilities instead with similar mechanics. The way it works is you roll some against some probability on each eligible kill to spawn whatever zombie-type thing. In hellcrawl the probability scales with spellpower, and it's generally a weaker effect than dcss's animate dead, for example.

A natural way to do this in dcss would be to keep the zombie/skeleton ability on yred (now with passive mechanics as described above, removing animate skeleton and animate dead), make kiku's corpse ability simply summon zombies or whatever with whatever necessary balance adjustments, and perhaps provide some version of simulacrum as a higher piety kiku passive (again with mechanics like those above). Obviously just remove corpse rot lol.