[1.3.3200] "Allow fresh" storage setting confuse players

Started by glass zebra, February 13, 2022, 02:56:04 PM

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glass zebra

This is mostly an UX issue, though can lead to unexpected behaviour that I've seen players call a bug.

I've seen a few posts from players having issues with not being able to haul certain things. While there are a variety of different issues possible, the "allow fresh" setting in storages seems to be one of the most arcane and seems to be an artefact/coder logic option mostly.

"Fresh" is directly the opposite of the "rotten" filter in the storage, yet a lot of items just have the "fresh" tag without being able to have a rotten state at all. I've seen different posts with players having issues hauling stuff like mech corpses, chocolate, kibble, beer among other things, because they disable the "fresh" filter apparently thinking it is a filter for fleshy corpses. This makes sense since fleshy corpses are the only thing that can exist rotten, but a lot of different things in the game are "fresh" (I think any corpse, anything with nutrition and anything with a shelf life) regardless if there is any rotting mechanic or state attached to those. I think there used to be a rotten state for other items (food?) before I started playing Rimworld, but a lot of items are just fresh now and never rotten. The use of this tag seems a bit outdated in several cases.

Since those multi option filters that exist on the same level usually convey something like "accept both states, accept one of the states or accept none of them" it could probably be pulled down into the corpse category (like all the options for apparel) and the tagging changed, though this might still confuse people with mech corpses. Quite a few players seem to apply these solely to corpses in their head and frankly unchecking "allow fresh" to exclude a ton of different items is probably not a good use case. I know this might not be that easy really, since quite a few items and menus have those settings, but they are not exactly used except for butcherable corpses.

I can try to gather some links to support this if you like me to. Quite a few players some to like to just change a lot of settings without holding back much and that unchecking "allow fresh" forbids a lot of items is rather arcane and probably not easy to grasp by someone how runs into the message "cannot haul: no available storage" when they do have a storage that allows e.g. beer. Hard to analyse storage issues pop up some time to time and I would say this one is probably the most understandably confusing one.

Random examples:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/294100/discussions/0/1736594593605954453/?ctp=2#c6081551521123479638
https://steamcommunity.com/app/294100/discussions/0/1752358461521942217/#c6081551521122016739

Pheanox

I will put this also in my doc for review to see how the devs might want to tackle the storage logic for fresh.