cherimoya farming rework/nerf
i think the cherimoya rotsac currently ruins the survival mechanics of the game, as soon as you get access to growbeds you no longer have to engage with the hunger/water systems due to how easy they are to farm in mass quantities. my proposed solution is to make them more “competitive”, so the more you put in one growbed, the longer they take to grow (you could argue it doesn’t make sense how they’re supposed “pure predators” but can still somehow sustain themselves when there are twenty of them bunched up in a 5mx5m square?). alternatively you could make the mercury sulfide buildup mentioned in the pda a tangible mechanic, and damage players for overeating them.
on my first playthrough from before farming was added, i distinctly remember praising the survival mode for being less of a pushover than the first game’s, and how it expanded upon both prepared foods (like 1/bz’s nutrient block and pepper salad) as well as self-sustaining stuff like the algae biomod (almost like a hunger equivalent of sn1’s stillsuit!!). on top of that, due to how much the game actively encourages dying to reset yourself (with the concept of “respawning” being half the focus of the game’s canon) the food system doesn’t matter as much anyway!! if you’re about to starve, as long as you’re around/in your base it’s often better to let it happen, since it lets you save your food for when you’re away from the base.
however, on every subsequent playthrough i haven’t really felt this at all. the game gives you a lot of nutrient blocks + water early on, more than enough to let new players find the cherimoya in the immediately adjacent biome, and while they work great in the early game to keep starvation at bay while you gather more substantial food, the growbeds kinda ruin everything the moment you get access to them. farmable food has always made survival mode redundant in the other games, but at the very least sn1 made you have to replant food, and bz made you prepare a multi-part meal. in sn2, it’s like having small marblemelons that don’t spoil and grow automatically like a lantern fruit would. you can fill an entire growbed with them and have a consistently regrowing, zero-effort full refill. on top of this, since there’s no spoilage, you can take a bunch of them on longer trips, barely taking any inventory space since you can just eat a few every time you’re full on items.
i cannot stress enough how overpowered they are, you get access to growbeds halfway through the current EA1 progression and i feel like it completely undermines the danger of living on proteus. you can’t just focus the game’s story on a planet where everything is poison and how there isn’t any plant life, only to have the easiest farmable food in the series by far, right?????