Camping Supplies No Longer Wasted in Non-Restable Areas

[Wids]

So yesterday, Barleigh was roving the Upperdark.  She came to that one hook-horror-infested area with that little rest area, the cavern with all the myconids.  She had some firewood, so I thought, "Great!  Barleigh can camp here, rest up, get all of her spells, Smite Evils and Lay on Hands back, and prepare to make her way to the Horde Cavern from here."  But despite being in the little cavern with the rest area, I apparently clicked on a piece of floor that was outside the rest area's invisible boundaries, and Barleigh thus lost her first, last and only firewood.  She managed to kill a buttload of gibberlings anyway, but whoa, that cyclops she met on the way there wrung her out a bit.  

Today, Falteine found her way to the Lonely Cavern in the Greypeaks.  It has the little campsite where that miner had made his camp some time ago (before vanishing into thin air, as hinted at by his journal), so I thought, "Cool, Falteine can rest here, get all her Hit Points back and find her way back to the Abandoned Keep with all the giant spiders."  But it turns out that the Lonely Cavern isn't rest-worthy, so she lost her firewood.  She made her way to the Tower of Fifty-Bazillion Spiders anyway, because Barbarians are tough like that.

All the same, could the scripting for firewood, cookpots and tents be fixed so that they aren't used and deleted if you try to use them in a non-restable area or a non-restable patch of terrain outside of a rest zone?  It would make sense; if your adventurers can't rest in an area for whatever reason ("It's not safe here," or "There are too many monsters nearby," or "The ground is too wet/mushy/rocky/hot/gale-blasted/covered in briars/covered in reeking corpses/covered in lava/radioactive/on fire/explosive for us to make camp here," or "We can't camp here, we're on a friggin' bridge!"), they're not going to try staking down the tent or piling the firelogs; they're going to keep their camping supplies bundled up as they move along until they find a suitable place to set up camp.

Thanks for your consideration.   

[justicedragon]

You don't like the idea of just dumping out your wood on the ground and not picking it back up? I wonder if there's a script check that's available to essentially say "if successful add +1 charge" because that's what needs to occur

[Wids]

If I want to dump my firewood and not pick it back up, I can do that just by Right-Clicking it in my inventory and picking Drop. Kal's area cleaner-upper bot will handle the rest as soon as I leave the area.

That solution might work for tents and cookpots, since those items have charges. But would it work for firewood, which has no charges?

[kalbaern]

There are a lot of issues to overcome trying to fix a minor nuisance like this one. I have a few ideas, but would likely hold off on any actual changes until we've converted over to EE. I'll outline the difficulties below.

1 - Consumables or items with charges are destroyed by the game's mechanics when zero charges are left. The exception is if the item is set to "plot". Items so marked would not be destroyed, but neither can you sell them either. To sell them, I'd need to script specialty merchants to buy the like I did for some of the "books" found that you have to take to the library in Loudwater for a reward. It would also mean folks would begin just dropping wood or cookpots or tents all over the place as few would bother carrying them to the specialist merchants.

2 - For single use resting items like wood bundles, the fix is the easiest. If used/activated improperly, create a new one in the characters inventory. To create an item in game however, the item needs to also reside on our "item palettes". While this seems to be a minor thing, It also means that our resource count rises with each one placed there. While small individually, resource counts creep higher and higher quickly when we do this by making exceptions for one thing, then another, then another. Items with more than one use would require extra scripting to add a charge back only if one or more charges still exist, then drop a single use version if used improperly and it only had one charge left and was used up. Since the game engine creates first, then destroys things last in any script (even if you try and delay the creation or specify the destruction first) those players with poor inventory management will begin dropping stuff on the ground constantly.

3 - Time or lack there of. The single biggest issue would be not applying 1 and 2 above, but the time spent going through merchant stores and the chests that control our foraging and loot drops to update every instance of the resting items in them. I just don't have the dozens of hours at my disposal to do this right now. This is also a task that will need duplicated when we do convert of to EE at some point. When the EE conversion goes live next year, these items will also become stackable (the wood bundles at least) and require swapping out once again. So I'd prefer to only do it once.

-Kalbaern-