Bread in the Realm

Dear Seekers,

Before changing anything I would like to hear at least a few well thought opinions about this matter.
First this, the pig update yet has to be happen. It's not forgotten nor ignored.

This discussion is to increase the usefulness of bread and directly related to bread; the Wheat Fields, Milling, Baking and the Soup Kitchen.

The Soup Kitchen; While writing this post there's about 10k bread donated in total to the Soup Kitchen. Both Spero and Camaar have more than 4,000 breads in stock, while Sarmiz and Azetyth have less than 150 breads available.

The Soup Kitchen changes Lord Arogandor wants to do:

• Merging the different soup kitchens of the towns. Meaning the bread in the soup kitchen would be the sum of all the bread donated to all the towns. This ensures that no town ever lacks bread for newbies. Either there's bread available in any town or there's none available in all the soup kitchens. Donating bread to your town remains unchanged!
  
• Raising the age Seekers can consume a free bread from the soup kitchen from 30 days to 60 days instead.
  

Additional Bread use: I would like to change the cost of hiring followers and ask a bread / day instead of a certain amount of money. Although money is logic and more flexible, paying bread for hiring followers might create an increased demand for bread. If for example Porkard the Pig Tenderer would require a bread a day instead of 18 bronze, bread would be more in demand.

As a newbie who has just recently passed my 30 day 'probation', I don't think there's a need to raise the limit to 60 days. Just by following the tutorial quests and investing in a couple of chickens should surely set you up with enough food/bread to get you started?
I like the idea of pooling the Soup kitchen bread; will help out less populated towns with their supply - Visions of Soup kitchen volunteers dashing about the countryside making sure all of us bedraggled noobs are kept well fed.
Also, paying followers with bread gets a thumbs up from me. It sounds like my workplace where I get paid peanuts...

I think the main thing standing in the way of making wheat farming and milling at least moderately useful skills are the daily council tasks that generate free flour. From what I can tell most towns are actively selling it on the markets at a price no farmer/miller could compete with. I assume the idea behind this council task is the ability for every town to be able to stock their soup kitchen quickly and at a low cost? If that is the case, perhaps it would be better to keep the regular milling functions (milling orders, tax etc) of the role as they are, but change the daily task to one that generates bread for the local soup kitchen instead of flour? That way the council role no longer affects the market for flour and by extension bread.

Additional uses for bread would be good and I agree that followers could be a good fit, but it will also decrease the amount of money going out of the game. You are probably in a better position to judge which is more important.

I'm not a big fan of combining the soup kitchens and don't really see the need for it? 150 bread is definitely not a small amount, that should last at least a full month and with the daily council action it should be easy to keep them from going empty. If there really are shortages and its negatively affecting newbies I don't mind the change, but with the council role each town should already have the tools to have enough affordable bread available.

I am not a fan at all of merging soup kitchens. If a town has a need, that town should step up instead of relying on hand outs from other towns. Start an election if your town cannot meet needs. Don't move to another town if you don't want to live in a new town with less services.

remember bread is a stat less food. if we up the uses of bread it would also increase the price of bread. imo bread was perfect before its update it was cheap it was available always. 
a food only met to feed you. and gives no benefits other then that should be cheap and readily available  as of now it costs about the same as an egg so we rather buy an egg then a bread..

moving bread to a follow doesn't solve a problam,  may even mean seekers will stop using followers.

i see the answer as
mayor need to keep bread production for the tavern 
or
bread is supplied by Grail lords at higher price, and other seekers can supply cheaper cost.

I think merging restaurants or even just the bread part penalize towns that produced and under producing town will just let other towns do the work.  think merging is a bad idea.

I quite agree that bread needs to be improved; at the moment it is scarcely used, since it is barely cheaper than eggs or (possibly) meat, and has no advantages over them. And if it's not used, there's no point in producing it.
I don't think merging the soup kitchens will help; there aren't, surely, new Seekers going hungry at the moment? By removing the local touch and the need to support your town, it might actually reduce the amount of bread baked.
Extending the 'grace period' might help slightly, but the cure would be worse than the disease.  At the moment, a new player knows he has one month as a newcomer to set up a lifestyle, including a food supply (whether that is a chicken for eggs, a field or two, or work for cash and go to the market/restaurant). With this change, it would be all too easy to dabble in one skill,  move over to another, interrupt that for a short-term need - and end up six months in with no skill above 25, which misses a lot of the fun.

Followers working for bread makes sense, but the rates would have to be carefully set.

Some ideas to consider:
Allow experienced Seekers (maybe as a reward from the mayor, or consolation prize in the lottery) access to the Soup Kitchen for a month. You don't have to use it, but the Soup Kitchen's turnover increases.

Bread reduces Decadence for everybody, not just the pleasure-seekers as at present.

You can't carry meals with you to another town, only bread. You can still buy meals there, but probably better to have some bread in case the restaurant is empty or expensive.

In addition to the current food requirements, going without bread for a week costs a life/stamina point or two. (Bread and beer contain all the vitamins you need, but meat or eggs don't) Your choice whether to forego one stat increase, or eat an extra meal.

One, two, three, four,
I declare a bread war. 

We should be able to hire geese with bread to antagonize another player or possibly town. Maybe they lose their daily dice roll or get a bad event or something....

Lovely suggestions for people who are already established. 

I obviously don't know what rules players formerly used to advance their characters, but they weren't the current form of the game.

New players cannot wait until someone decides "I think I'll buy the (grapes, eggs, whatever they can sell) today" instead of trading with a friend who already has the goods in quantity.  And that's assuming that no one undercuts a reasonable market price (as happened today with Grapes dropping 16% or so). Offers to buy a peasant's goods at 1/2 to 2/3 of the item price already for sale on the market is not a sustainable economy. It's merely exploitation of newbies. That works irl but not so well for game players.

I have been given all sorts of help, more than I expected, actually. No complaints at all. But I can't eat donated equipment, stamina, invested money, or information. I could forego the 2 Beers a day (total 46 B at present) at the cost of losing Stamina that I need. Now I have to buy Bread. I had 3 animals. I had to kill the chicken or lose it, but now I can't replace it, because - no cash.

My investments in field and farm turn out to be useless. No one is buying. I don't want to play a game in which I play a beggar. Donations are not the answer - they simply extend the death spiral.

Peasants did not buy subsistence food (until relatively recently). They grew it, or simply picked berries or killed squirrels. They were taxed for the extra they grew, but the lord generally had no incentive to starve the peasants to death, just into poverty. My parents grew most of our food. 

I just today discovered that the 4 city markets were separate. Why are newbies allowed to randomly choose difficult cities? And the markets are so anemic anyway. One market for the game is entirely reasonable. Some npc could be making a living moving goods around. The area of the game is not very large.

My suggestions (I can hear the howls from the "I got mine" crowd already):

Do away with free bread, and remove any requirement to eat for basic Stamina. Give Bread a minor Stamina bonus, not enough to help older players a whole lot, but help newbies get started a little quicker *if* they pay.

Have a single game market, at least  for general goods. Most games I play do that with no issues. Separate markets might be appropriate for Luxury goods, but again, the area isn't physically large enough to create different market costs.

Allow sales to an npc for 1/2 of the lowest (or average or median) market sale price. Using lowest would be easier, but would also allow easy griefing, akin to the people who try to get newbies drunk so they lose Stamina. It wouldn't pay as much as a player paying 2/3 but it would always be available, and wouldn't be exploitation where a player profits from screwing the newbie.

While I'm at it, please remove the 1 S cost to access the library. It takes a relatively long time and/or costs a lot for a newbie to learn to read. Then it requires a full day of working for the town just to access the library for 1 week. I was going to use my Grapes for Wine, and other mats for Soups, but I can't pay to stay in the library long enough to finish either book. No one seems to need much of either commodity anyway. Or remove the option for a new player to learn Reading, which will restrict the opening choices even more. Currently, it's a dead end.

Raising Mood by 2 or 3 is no benefit. If the Voting and other Mood increases at least offset the 10-point daily drop, it would mean that keeping Mood up didn't drain money from new players. Most of the Beer is bought in the tavern, and older players seem to have plenty of cash to buy rounds.

Headed to my hermitage.

I've been shocked to hear from a variety of older players recently that bread and flour is largely useless. Bread is really really useful. Or has been for me. Lol

I think I ate bread straight for a year and a half. I still eat it 50 percent of the time (I probably could do without bread now...but then I wouldn't be able to donate as much money for town programs and buy a round of drinks now and then...and I'd rather save my money and do that..

Bread is the cheapest food, and you need it when out of town. I really did not have the money for over a whole year to buy anything else. Even eggs or meat was risky, because you had to spend stamina cooking it-which meant earning less and at the end of every day, I'd have 3-10b. Now I chose fishing-which is not an advisable beginning profession. So maybe that's a bad example.

Joe, I also see that crops and other goods are stagnant in the market which hurts new players the most. I won't name names but I've heard complaining and frustrated comments about how rough the economy currently is for newbies by many newbies. That is offset by the generosity of alot of more established seekers and town programs....but we do need a solution to that because seekers are getting frustrated by what they see as established seekers trading away and the newbies goods sit, or they have to lower the price and barely make ends meet and wonder if they have to change profession again...or keep relying on kind seekers to help them out. hopefully there is a solution to solve this as well as this bread crisis/situation?


Back to the main topic though...
Not sure if pooling the town's soup kitchen is good or not...what if the bread only pools over to another town after your own soup kitchen caps off at a Max of idk...2000 bread or something in soup kitchen? Each town is still responsible. But they can still be helped out if bread is over produced somewhere else?


but I like the suggestion that if it is combined , it becomes a kind of town task...or repeatable quest maybe?

Did not someone used to have the idea about some traveling merchant where people could buy or sell a few basic goods at set prices? Maybe it only applies to seekers a year or 2 old...and other seekers older would need to buy a membership using silver or tokens to use the traveling merchant?

As for how to make bread more useful...I like the idea of giving it more uses...just not sure what that could be. If all the other goods raise a stat, perhaps bread could raise a random stat by x amount? Or a some other kind of bonus...like increase you chance of a random encounter...or something?

Also, I love the repeatable workshop quest, what do you think about having a similar one that pops up randomly when working in the kitchen. You might have to cook meals, or soup and earn your way to a cheap pie fork or something.

Sorry for the pile of random ideas, I'm just throwing a bunch of ideas out there.

Good ideas, Junilee.

If Bread is not *required* for subsistence, it will go a long way toward helping newbies (and maybe some older players also). Baked or purchased Bread could give +1 Stamina or more each. Not as much as Pralines, but useful nonetheless. A little more complicated, but possible, is that if you did not eat some food yesterday, you cannot roll +Stamina to start today - you get nothing if the roll would give you Stamina.

I like your idea of repeatable tasks for gaining Food or Beer over and above subsistence. It's not limited to the kitchen though. Fieldwork, feeding animals, repairing a fence, etc. were all traded in the past for a better meal than trail food.

The problem with the Traveling Merchant is that it might not be there when needed. And the town would be full of npc that need items. Although the town npc are buying at below the current asking price, even long-time players may want/need to dump hoarded goods. In addition, the npc could sell items at a percentage (25% or 50%) above the current asking price. That may be more work for Aro, or maybe not. That could convince players to start more projects, because if they were a few items short, they know they can buy the rest, even if at a high price, to finish.

Reading through the help files allowed me as a newbie to do well. As well as the Sarmiz announcement at the town office, it all really hammered down what I planned to do. Instead of doing multiple professions (which the tutorial asked not to do) I decided to stick to the ranching sector. 

I wanted to be a farmer at first til I realised how much stamina I would need to spend. So I switched to becoming a rancher and started doing town jobs in the town animal breeding program and working for Wanjia building master locks for the town. It paid well and supported my blacksmithing skill.

Starting out in Sarmiz, from which I saw had a low population and defined itself as a new town, made me think it was going to be harder. But that’s why I went there as I entered this realm. So my perspective is reflective of my experience there.

In my ranch I have a cow and two hens. My plan involves spending stamina on animal husbandry and cooking after the age of free bread and without Bandalf’s free stamina. I estimate this would hurt my income only by about 25 bronze. Thus reducing my income from an average of ~70 bronze to ~50 a day. As other seekers have pointed out two hens can make you live forever. Making buying from others a less popular option to rid hunger. In order to help, newbies should be buying from the the restaurant at affordable prices when they begin a job in the town (I was considering on living on buzadam’s bread for awhile, til he donated it all). More bread has been added since then after Aro’s announcement, however, I am already self sustained from the hens.

P.S. getting a journal asap because increasing stamina is the best long term goal. Also I plan to become indestructible. Maybe I need to visit the grail tavern every once in a while.

I agree the Help files do make a difference if you follow them . And I agree hens are the best for self sustaining oneself with food-provided you stay in town to take care of them

Maybe I'll see you around the tavern

Good idea, Aro. I thinks this will help out alot of new seekers. Espeically if they pick a more difficult profession like I did.

I'm done donating bread, then. I'm not giving out welfare checks to Sarmiz and Azetyth. And I have donated over 3,500 bread, so the realm will feel it without me donating. Let them all starve.

When I joined a few weeks ago, I did not know that each city had an independent economy, and that Sarmiz and Azetyth were considered "hard" cities to live in. I picked Sarmiz for no particular reason.

I invite everyone to join me in Camarr, and to start all newbies there. Let's all share the best economy. We'll always be on the winning side of the (currently rigged) Grailympics. Let those who want to move to the sticks for a "real challenge" have a really big challenge. No more running around the countryside for a better market. Who's with me? 
Disclosure: none of my sarcasm was harmed in writing this post.