Project Update - Hunting and Foraging Design and UI Changes (Patreon)

Recently, we took the time to explain how we approach suggested changes and feature requests. We also went over our main priorities moving forward, and are excited to present some of those changes to you today. Having now made changes to movement in a general sense, our next goal was to tackle hunting and foraging, and consequently, we have made some significant alterations and additions that will be integrated into one of our upcoming builds.

Currently, it is only possible to hunt and/or forage from the camp menu, which some players have commented on as strange. We tend to agree, which is why players will now be able to do so during any point of their journey for the cost of two movement points or one vigor if you are out of movement points. What’s more, for the same price vagri will now be able to send out their comes on expeditions to get supplies multiple times during a single day, which can be especially useful if your first attempt is a fail and you still desperately need supplies.

Take note, however – subsequent attempts will face diminishing returns, depending on the result of your initial attempt. These additional attempts will always display the percentage chance of success, just as it has always been. It will then be up to you to decide if you wish to send out another expedition or give up on acquiring supplies for the day.

You may also notice that we have renamed the whole process to ‘Acquire Supplies’, partly because of another new feature we will be integrating, namely, ‘Auto-acquire Supplies.’ This feature functions just how it sounds: allowing the player to set predetermined conditions that will automatically set your workers, scouts, and slaves to the task of hunting and foraging, provided that the node you occupy meets those conditions.

In the example below you can see the new feature in action; the top slider below each category represents the minimum chance of success for that action to be triggered when you next strike camp. In this example, the node requires an average base chance of success of 48% for hunting and 30% for foraging respectively. Below that, we can see another slider that represents the minimum average supply yield from a node, which can function as an independent condition or together with the above slider, simply by toggling the two buttons that sit between them.

From a design perspective, our intentions here were twofold: to give players more agency when deciding how to acquire and manage their supplies, and secondly, to bring additional quality of life to the table. The former is achieved by allowing players more customization and opportunities for hunting and foraging, while the latter is attained by making it so there's one less thing for players to worry about after they have set up the conditions for auto-acquire to function seamlessly.

As shown below, when your current node meets your previously set auto-acquire conditions, those settings will be pre-filled when you next navigate the camping UI. If the conditions are not met, you can still manually allocate your crew to the task, too.

As you might have guessed, these changes also have wider implications for the ways that scouting currently works – indeed, the ability to hunt or forage during the day makes scouting more valuable in and of itself already. While everything is subject to change during development, we will soon be sharing the details of major scouting changes in an upcoming post. Until then, as always – stay safe and conquer the wasteland!

– The Lost Pilgrims Team