RMMV Need help creating a Foraging mechanic

[Morpheus]

So in my game, players can forage for food, plants, wood, etc. on the world map. Some notes so far about the mechanics and related mechanics...

• You forage better in forest areas than in other regions.
• The player also needs to be able eat and sleep or their health stops dropping.
• The amount that you forage/collect is determined by both a d20 roll + Forage Skill

The issue I'm currently running into is that I can't think of a reason why a player wouldn't just only forage for food when their food gets low. I thought about dropping their Sleep when they forage but then I feel like the game becomes a mix of only foraging and sleeping in the early levels when/if they have low Forage skill. So I thought about not having the forage skill give a significant amount of food, or perhaps if their Forage skill is low maybe they eat poisoned berries more often or something but then the forage skill becomes not worth it until it's nearly maxed out so that there's no risk to foraging.

I'd love to hear some feedback on this mechanic and your ideas on how to improve this mechanic to make it either not useless or not OP for restoring food.

 

[Finnuval]

Perhaps control it via a respawn counter. (for aged berrie take x amount of time to regrow?)
Then Balance the amount a player can forage with how much they need it and the time it takes to respawn...

I dunno, it depends a lot on how the rest of your game is structured really

 

[senmingwu]

Hmm. Not programmer, and barely artist, so salt & lemon juice in tea for this one:

What's your goal with the game? What's your intention for the player's experience?

-->If player = explorer, wouldn't a bell curve of scarcity -- none-some-many-some-none -- work to your favor? That could be tied to distance from camp/town, time of day, how many times per game launch player foraged. Essentially a hidden variable that cycles or resets -- that way the player is empowered to forage for a bit & discouraged from extremes like never foraging or only foraging. Doom and Diablo did some form of this as timers.

-->If player = adventurer, skill-based is experience-limiting. Whereas region-based reasons for foraging, incl. berries/materials/ingredients with varying effects, will naturally form a synthesis with the experience of adventure-camp/town/rest loops and encourages a slower to medium pace. Dragon's Dogma -- especially the expansion, Dark Arisen -- and the Pokémon series did this well.

-->If player = part of story, then character-dependent foraging with low skill finding common materials & high skill finding rarer materials may work better (weighted rarity + fixed quantity > semi-random quantity). Then your mechanic rewards players developing the skill, and the only punishment for not using foraging is "missing out." Idk many games with foraging skill past MUD/Runescape & Wurm, though there are level-/progression-based variations of this in Golden Sun series, Borderlands series, Fable TLC, FF XII, Diablo III(?), and even Spec Ops: The Line.

-->If player = feedback for your irl skills, your best bet may be to look at different games/mods & model what you can on paper and then amalgamating or adapting parts from those models. If anything, I find pen & paper gives +100 to Clarity. Breath of the Wild's foraging invites player agency & creativity, Skyrim's MCN/iNeeds/RND mods strike different balances between reward/punishment, CandyCrush has ingredient collection as mini-puzzles, and Minecraft & Terraria have survival/hard modes that reward cyclical foraging and short gameplay loops to break up hours of exploration.

Ehm.
I read your post/open invite to troubleshooting as if you had an ideal way you'd like players to interact with the foraging mechanic, but you're unsure of how to go about it. My apologies if that interpretation's off the mark haha