Meals and salt

[Sarcaticous 338]

In the Wiki it says meals decay faster with salt. Days one and two no damage with or without salt. Day three with salt significant damage, 60. Day three without salt damage 0. Is this correct or is this a typographical error? 

 

http://www.wurmpedia.com/index.php/Meal

 

10.0 QL meal with salt Day 0 = 0.0 damage Day 1 = 0.0 damage Day 3 = 60.0 damage

10.0 QL meal without salt Day 0 = 0.0 damage Day 1 = 0.0 damage Day 3 = 0.0 damage

 

If this is indeed correct someone needs to reexamine their reasoning for making meals with salt decay more readily than without.

[Hailene 362]

Sample size is too small.

 

Try 50 salted and 50 unsalted meals at once and see how they compare.

[Sarcaticous 338]

The problem here is that this is as it is stated in the Wiki. I think there is a Wiki section here someplace. I'll place a change request there. 

[Aeris 3,752]

lol, the wiki is to be taken with a grain of salt anyway ( ;D )

[KyleBooze 451]

sounds right to me... why would anybody think salt helps prevent meal decay when nothing else works like it should?

[Hailene 362]

It's not necessarily an issue with salt.

 

Damage ticks can accumulate.  You can have zero decay and suddenly get smacked with 2 weeks of decay at once.  How Wurm decides when to release these ticks are unknown to the playerbase.  It just...happens.

 

Your experiment does not prove, either way, whether salt affects meal decay at all.  As I said, you're going to need a much bigger sample size to draw any useful conclusions.

[Aeris 3,752]

As he said, he's not the one who performed the experiment.

[Hailene 362]

Oh, I see.  I misread the initial post.  My apologies.

 

Yeah, good change there.  It seems silly to try to spread information on such a small sample size.

Edited September 28, 2015 by Hailene

[Raybarg 437]

Salt reduces decay is true, in theory.

 

In theory the decay hits will hit random items inside a container, like barrel. If you have water there, and salt there (or many salts) the chances of decay hits hitting the water or the salts is away from the ticks meals take.

 

Which also means that if you store alot of meals in your food barrel and some of them take decay hits... do not remove and throw them away, as they also will be there to take random decay hits, increasing the chances of "that one good meal" to last very long.

[Dairuka 888]

Honestly, due to the nature of decay - you'd need a sample size of thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands to see any statistical variance at all.

 

Oh, I see.  I misread the initial post.  My apologies.

 

Yeah, good change there.  It seems silly to try to spread information on such a small sample size.

 

It takes hours, days and weeks of hard work to debunk something that only took a few seconds for someone to make up.

[CubeManV2 231]

or you could just make 50 meals and they last about 4-5 days and takes like 10-15 minutes

[Skren 19]

Salt reduces meal decay "IN INVENTORY" .. which is pretty brutal to start with, but if you gotta carry a meal, you definitely want salt to be one of the ingredients.

[Telurius 52]

There are two main aspects to decay: damage per decay tick and decay tick frequency.  Cooking salt into food dishes affects damage per decay tick.  Meals (and most other food items) use normal QL-based decay, meaning they take ( perishability / EffectiveQL ) damage per decay tick.  Meals cooked without salt have a perishability of 1100, while those cooked with salt as an ingredient have a perishability of 600, which reduces the damage they take per decay tick.  Many other food dishes also have reduced perishability from being cooked with salt, though the exact formula for the reduction varies by food dish type.  Decay tick frequency is affected by item type and location (For example, food tends to decay significantly faster in a player's inventory, while many other item types won't decay in a player's inventory.  Containers outside a player's inventory tend to slow decay tick frequency for their contents.), but there's also some randomness to decay tick frequency.

 

A 10 QL meal without salt would be destroyed instantly by a decay tick, while a 10 QL meal cooked with salt would take 60 damage from the first decay tick and be destroyed by the second.  With such a small difference in the number of decay ticks to destroy them, which will decay first will be pretty random, though if you compared a large number (hundreds) with all else the same except some being cooked with salt and some without those cooked with salt would be expected to last longer on average.

 

Edit: I forgot to include this originally, but it's also worth noting there are some QL ranges for low QL food dishes for which cooking with salt will not have a significant impact on decay.  For example, it will not have any impact on decay for meals at or below 6 QL, which will decay in one tick regardless of whether or not they're cooked with salt.  It will not have much impact on meals between 11 QL and approximately 15.708204 QL, which will take different amounts of damage on their first decay tick depending on whether or not they're cooked with salt, but will be destroyed by their second decay tick regardless of whether or not they're cooked with salt.

Edited September 29, 2015 by Telurius

[Sarcaticous 338]

Thank you for the information Telurius. 

 

The Romans used heavily salted hard cheeses in their armies. This cheese was so heavily salted some examples that have been found are still edible although it is quite hard. It would be nice to enable players to prolong the life of meals by adding more salt, the amount of salt deciding how much damage was taken. It isn't going to happen but it would be nice. 

[Sullen 30]

This is another wonderful example of all the mechanics that can and will be tested with WU since it exponentially reduces the amount of preparation to perform a proper experiment like this. I can't wait!!