Isn't fixing 90 day limit enough for you? People cannot spend too much time farming herbs just because of it.
Also, I think that realism beats balance. I mean, why should herbs be anyhow connected with corruption? It doesn't make sence.

90 day limit shouldn't have any effect on herb farming... time passes very slowly in dungeons. Walking from one side of the overworld map to the other takes probably the same amount of days as farming 10000 herbs.

If I wanted to do a herb nerf, it would look something like this:
-Gods do not accept stoma as a sacrifice
-Herb usage cannot train potential stats
-Cursed morgia roots abuse toughness

Or, keep everything as is, but throw in this one:
-Herbs can rot

[edit]In maybe a more "realistic" twist on the OP, and in order to make food a more interesting and important mechanic later in the game, I might suggest that all food can rot, and food rotting increases with background corruption rate.

I like the idea to make herbs not train potential stats. In addition, imo it would be much better to base training on the base values, rather than on the modified values (from sickness, starvation, corruptions, rings of weakness, etc).

I don't see stomafillia saccing as imbalanced. There are other ways to gain similar amounts of piety as fast or faster. Like selling all the standard artifacts to Waldenbrook, robbing them back and saccing the ones you don't use.

Making all food rot is very punishing, especially for characters without food preservation.

Sure. But as it stands right now, food is basically a non-issue once you pass the very early game. If you wanted to make the food mechanic interesting and relevant to the game as a whole, this would probably be a sensible way to do it.

Abuse does not remove use. Herbs can be farmed to ludicrous extents if so inclined, but they also give characters a way to get at least semi-decent stats, which is why I'm also against making potentials "hard". Besides, not all PCs start with Herbalism - which is a guaranteed skill if you can defeat Keethrax, who is immune to three elements, shoots glowing balls, casts darkness, etc. You could make things even harder for those, not just hard.

Jelly's suggestion about rotting is nice, but not all food should rot. Large rations (for example) could be assumed to be well-preserved and thus non-perishable, at the cost of weighting 200s each and providing moderate satiation.

Herbalism skill is not at all necessary for herb farming. It just makes it take a lot longer. You max your stats and do a stoma (pre)crown or two without herbalism if you have enough patience and a good farm.

That, and the fact you can only pick cursed herbs, probably wouldn't go well with the idea of perishable herbs :)

Some thoughts:

1. What if all foodstuffs could rot, but only some could completely rot away? That is, all foodstuffs will eventually turn cursed at some point, but only the "perishable" foodstuffs will rot away completely. The time required for rotting would, of course, vary with the specific foodstuff. Large rations, for instance, might last a good 10000 turns before dropping one stage (B->U or U->C), while stomafillia might only last a good 200 turns. Only the things that already rot away would rot away, though. I also like the idea of the rotting rate being dependent on the background corruption rate, because the food is being corrupted. Locations with no background corruption would see non-perishable foodstuffs remain stable, while all foodstuffs would turn cursed almost instantaneously on the ChAoS pLaNe.

2. Herbs should have downsides. I mean, eating nothing but a herb designed to "fill your stomach" can't be good for ongoing health. Large rations give a lot of satiation, in exchange for being really heavy, and they're limited by how many you can buy in shops or find during adventuring... but Stomafillia just requires finding a nice herb patch and farming it to get a practically unlimited supply, it weighs nearly nothing and is worth much more in terms of satiation. It's also worth more as an offering, and has no impact on health. This seems rather unbalanced, to me.

One way to make them more balanced might be to have their effects made much weaker unless they are, say, prepared correctly. A common way to get real benefits from real herbs is to turn them into a tea - something based on this could work. Another way might be to have each herb negatively train a stat, or something.

3. If training above natural limits using sickness, starvation, rings of weakness, etc, were prevented in some way, the value of morgia and moss of mareilon would be somewhat diminished - there would only be so much value in collecting those herbs, because once you reach the natural limit in the three relevant stats, they become pretty much useless, rather than still being useful if used while sick, starving, etc. I believe there was a suggestion somewhere around here, for which I proposed that positive training and natural stat raises while a stat is reduced should be limited or even entirely prevented. I offered the idea, as I recall, that positive training effects should be reduced by 20% for each stat point of temporary reduction, so if a stat is "temporarily" reduced by 5 or more, you can no longer train it. Similarly, natural stat increases should be prevented if the stat is "temporarily" reduced by more than some number, for which 5 works well.

It makes sense, if you think about it - Toughness represents vitality, essentially... Sickness reduces vitality, which is why it drops Toughness most. Training Toughness while sick just doesn't make sense - you're low on vitality due to illness, you're not going to be improving it while in that state. So when Sickness lowers Toughness by 5, you can no longer train Toughness. You can still train Strength, for instance, but because you're weaker due to illness, the training won't be as effective.

4. Repeated offerings of the same item (except gold) should be nerfed - this would help reduce the value in collecting massive amounts of stomafillia. The same should also apply to selling large quantities of the same type of item to a shopkeeper - if they have 100 stomafillia in stock, why would they still pay top dollar for more of it? A side-effect of this is to reduce the value in continuing to let the Si duplicate for sac-fodder and to sell (I'm assuming that the casino exploits are addressed, so that money hasn't become trivial), which I think is reasonable. Something like, say, 1% reduction for each instance of the item, in terms of both piety and gold, would work - so, if you sell 100 stomafillia to Waldenbrook, and then try to sell another one, it'll be worth only 36% of the first one. For that first 100 of them, it would be worth just under 64x the value of selling the first one, assuming he had none in stock before you sold him any. The same scaling would apply to piety value of sacrificing them. If the piety value were to drop to the point of rounding to zero, the god could go "ENOUGH WITH THE <item>!", and no longer accept more of that specific item.

1. A Blessed Scroll of Uncursing fixes this pretty easily (if the stoma never rots away). And food isn't an issuse after the super early game anyways.

2. If each one negatively trains a different stat, it's just a question of if you gain stats overall, or lose them. If it's overall positive, people will still farm, it'll just be harder (like with corpses in bug temple; people eat them, then go pump their Wi back up after).

3. I think this is the goal. I think they are supposed to take your base stat into account, they just don't.

4. I don't like this idea. If herbs were fixed to only train your based on your base stats, I don't think this would matter. Gold isn't all that importat. I've robbed the black market at level one. You can rob Thundarr without pissing off DT. Gold doesn't really matter as is for the purposes of shops. Unless that changes, shopkeepers paying out less wouldn't affect much. Would live-sac's also get gradually less valueable? This just makes pre/post crowning much harder, doesn't it?

I agree that herbs mark a point in the game where it becomes much easier (infinite food/healing and huge stat jumps and status fixes), but I'm not sure the best way to change that (if it even needs to be changed). Making it depend on background corruption would probablly just make me use scrolls of danger in the big room to farm. And giving them negative side effects, like reducing other stats, only works if you fix all the other things relating to that (sickness/starvation training, etc). I also don't want the "fix" to be that it's just a huge pain in the ass now. It seems that there is no risk/reward ratio for herbs, which should be changed.

Well, that's the reason why I proposed all food would rot. Food would be at least something to be aware of for the entire game, if that stack of 200 cooked lizards that you bought is only going to last a handful of dungeon levels before it rots away. It's not likely to be that life-threatening for the most part, but it at least means that food will be a non-trivial mechanic passed level 10. If certain foods were exempted from this, I'd personally go with the exemptions being as narrow as possible, and restricted to items that can't just be easily acquired like rations, herbs, lizards, etc. Elven bread, gnomish candy, fortune cookies, those types of things. Well-preserved foods like rations could have a much lower rotting rate (like cooked food), but not last forever.

In broader context, I look at this issue more in the sense of this: There are massive benefits and few risks to using herbs to the point that winning without them is considered quite an accomplishment. But farming herbs is very boring and time-consuming for the player. I'd venture that there are few people who actually like farming herbs. It's just something that you do because you have to. So I think this is something that is probably worth changing to make the game more enjoyable. But some care does need to be taken to avoid also leading to a massive difficulty spike in 1.2.x+ compared to 1.1.1. A couple things that could happen, in my mind are then:

Reduce the effectiveness of herbs, but compensate in other ways that are less cumbersome. For example:
-Introduce more ways for passive stat training to compensate for active stat training with herbs being less effective. Eg. Fighting with missiles will slowly train Dx. Surviving critical hits from monsters trains To. Detecting traps trains Pe. Resisting confusion trains Wi, passing literacy checks on scrolls trains Le. Increase the amount of free stat training received at level up.
-Increase the effectiveness of regular potions of healing. Say, blessed pots give ~80 Hp, uncursed ~35, cursed ~10. This will reduce the need for spense/pepper since these pots are fairly common and underused.
-Increase the maximum effectiveness of the healing skill and racial regeneration rates slightly, for the same reason.
-Especially if the "all food rots" suggestion gets passed, I would couple that with increased rates of corpse generation across the board. Also reduces the need for stoma.

Basically, you want to reduce the power of herbs from "almost essential" to "nice to have, but you can get by without".

My main issue with all food rotting to the point of rotting away (or even all common food rotting) is that it becomes a nuisance, always having to pay attention to what hasn't rotted away in your inventory. Even with messages on rotting, the player has a reasonable chance to fail to notice that their stack of 10 large rations have just rotted away. It just becomes a frustration, rather than a complication.

If many foodstuffs rotted to the Cursed level, then yes, a blessed scroll of uncursing will undo that. But it's not like you'll always have an infinite supply of blessed scrolls of uncursing to use almost entirely for the sake of keeping your foodstuffs from being cursed. By having them rot to cursed, but not rot away, what you're doing is making the value of the foodstuffs drop with time, requiring some form of cleansing to compensate. Note that I would also alter some of the satiation values of certain foods when cursed. For instance, cursed cooked lizards should barely give you any satiation at all. What this does is it reduces the value in purchasing large numbers of cooked lizards, because they'll rot to cursed... but makes it so that you can still use them, and "wash" them to make them more satiating again.

That's certainly the goal. But I think that more passive stat training isn't the answer to the issue of morgia and moss of mareilon - it just makes the game easier, and shifts the valuable period for farming to earlier in the game. What we need is for herbs to not be so overpowered. As noted before, there needs to be a risk vs reward consideration with herbs, whereas the only risks right now are spending a lot of time farming (time limit concern) and trying to eat herbs without fully identifying them. All of the other food sources have drawbacks, but Stomafillia has none (except perhaps that it might make you bloated too quickly). Large numbers of healing herbs can be carried without much hassle. Stat training herbs are basically free stat increases to quite a high level. Poison and sickness curing herbs nearly nullify any concerns about either status.

If each herb had some sort of drawback, it would work much better, and make the question of using herbs a much more uncertain one - a matter of balancing the pros and cons.

For example, I can see three obvious ways to address the Stomafillia issue - have it abuse stats (which makes sense - you're eating a little herb to make you feel full, you're not really providing your body with the nutrients it needs), have it capable of rotting, or give it some temporary side-effect (perhaps it could slow you down for 10d10 turns, or something). And Alraunia Antidote and Curaria Mancox could abuse Toughness, perhaps. You get the idea, though.

I don't mind the idea of compensating slightly for the reduced value of herbs by slightly boosting other methods to achieve the same results.

At some point, food should become a solved problem. It's a somewhat interesting mechanic to have do struggle with in the early game, but once your character gets to superhero levels of power, having to struggle with basic survival is, in the most fitting choice of words, hella lame. So I'd say food rotting is exactly where it should be right now.

I do agree with Jelly Slayer on reducing the power level of some of the herbs at least somewhat. Removing sickness and starvation training and perhaps lowering the caps on mosses of mareilon and morgia roots is one part of the solution (25 Dex, Wi and To are already kind of enormous; why not 20?). Stomafillia isn't that much of a problem except perhaps for the easy piety they provide; making them un-sacrificable would fix it (again, I don't feel food in general needs fixing). Spense feels fine as it is, you need the Herbalism skill (which some classes can only get at the cost of Healing) to get the blessed ones in the first place, and they're weak enough that they aren't viable in-battle healing in the Tower and past it. Pepper petals already kind of suck since you can't use them while bloated. Alraunia and curaria don't really pose a problem either because ten of each is enough for an entire game and players tend to realize that quickly enough.

(The "risk/reward" factor in the early game is already present - it's in that you have to identify the herbs in the first place to get any use out of them.)

The only "almost essential" herb in the entire game is the morgia root for characters with anemic Toughness levels. Even now, Toughness below 10 can be raised by eating well. You could raise that threshold to 13 or 14 and morgia roots would become "nice to have" again, along with the rest. (Training Toughness by getting wounded in critical areas seems at least as counter-intuitive as sickness or starvation training, though.)



The thing is that there is a certain value to having guaranteed stuff in the game. Herbs are something you can expect to find in any game, and will solve some of the most basic issues, like getting poisoned or sick, or recovering from damage more quickly than endless w5, or food, or having crap stats. (Similar to how the ancient mummy wrapping provides death ray resistance and seeing invisible along with some indestructible PV.) I think it's fine if they still do all those things. Easy precrownings and attaining godly stats are the only things that need fixing from my point of view. (Fixing either removes the incentive to farm ridiculous amounts of stoma, morgia, moss, devil's roses, demon daisies, rather than modest amounts.) The whole "make them have negative effects, too" approach feels a bit too radical.

I'm not precisely sure how you think that having food rot to cursed, and then making cursed status food have worthless satiation values is all that much better. The outcome is essentially the same, because most of that cursed food you'll probably just throw away rather than waste valuable scrolls fixing, especially if it's just going to rot again long before you can make use of the entire stack.

Simple - if it only rots to Cursed, then in an emergency, you can dip in holy water or use a blessed scroll of uncursing. If it rots away completely, there's nothing you can do about it, and the only real alternative is prayer, which can be a fickle business with regards to prayer priority, not to mention that you can only do it so many times.

Plus, nearly-worthless satiation is different from completely worthless. If, for instance, a cursed Cooked Lizard gave you only one tenth of the satiation of an uncursed Cooked Lizard, then you would still be able to each 10-20 of them and get a reasonable enough amount of satiation (and as I recall, the turns required to eat something is proportional to its satiation value)... it's just that you really don't want to eat through 20 of them at a time, and it's a fair portion of the stack. If uncursed, you'd only need 2 or 3 of them, even less if blessed. With the rotting process finishing at Cursed, it's all about management of resources and taking some precautions. With complete rotting away, though, it becomes a much harder game, because you can easily find your stock of food rotting at the most inopportune time, and there's little you can do to stop it (except perhaps Food Preservation, and even that isn't a guarantee).

"Harder game" wouldn't even be so bad, but it doesn't become harder, just way more annoying.

I have already done some things to prevent herb abuse, we should test that first. Currently I do not think that more optimization is needed.