"The Isle" is an open-world survival game where players embody dinosaurs in a challenging ecosystem. One of the most crucial, yet debated, elements of the game is the diet system. This article delves into the intricacies of the diet system in "The Isle," particularly focusing on the EVRIMA build, its impact on gameplay, and potential improvements.
Understanding the Diet System in "The Isle"
The diet system in "The Isle" is designed to simulate the nutritional needs of dinosaurs, influencing their growth, abilities, and overall survival. Players must manage their diet carefully to gain advantages and avoid debilitating debuffs. Neglecting dietary needs can lead to infertility and reduced stats, while a perfect diet offers significant benefits.
Nutrient Types and Their Effects
There are three nutrient types in "The Isle," represented by symbols: "//", "S", and "∴". Each nutrient type offers specific stat changes, divided into main stat increases and special buffs.
// (Nutrient 1):
- Main: Growth Rate Increased
- Special: Egg Incubation Speed Increased
S (Nutrient 2):
Read also: The Hoxsey Diet
- Main: Scent/NV Range Increased
- Special: Stamina Decay Decreased
∴ (Nutrient 3):
- Main: Health/Locked Health Regen Increased
- Special: Bleed Resist Increased
Perfect Diet Combinations and Buffs
A perfect diet is achieved by consuming the right combination of nutrients. The effects of a diet depend on the balance of these nutrients. More nutrients generally equate to more buffs.
- Single Nutrient Diet: Provides a marginally increased growth speed, regardless of the nutrient type.
- 2-1 Diet: A diet with two of one nutrient and one of another provides a greater main buff from the two nutrients (15%) and a 10% main buff from the third nutrient, along with a special buff.
- Triple Nutrient Diet: A diet consisting of all three nutrient types provides a balanced set of buffs.
Finding the Right Diet
The table above can be used to find out the effects of a diet. All you need to know for that is that first and foremost: more nutrient = more buff. So if you only want stamina regeneration and don't care for anything else, going for triple ∴ might be wise. If you prefer a 2 - 1 diet for more variety, you will get a greater main buff from the 2 nutrients (15%). The third nutrient will give you a 10% main buff and a special buff. If you only look for a special buff, you can determine the right diet for you by reading from left to right and top to bottom in the small table. For example: let's say you need blood regeneration. You can find that special buff in the ∴ column on top, which means, you need a 2 - 1 diet with one ∴. In order to find out the other nutrient, simply read from left to right. Blood regen on top means the first nutrient on the left, which is "//". So //, //, ∴ is the one you are looking for. Or another example: you instead want fracture resist + 10%, so again bottom special buff means the second nutrient from the left. We skip the "S", since that is the nutrient you only need one of and go to the next one instead, which is ∴ and the final combination is ∴, ∴, S.
Gameplay Implications of the Diet System
The diet system significantly impacts gameplay, influencing how players interact with the environment and other players. A well-managed diet can provide crucial advantages, while neglecting it can lead to severe disadvantages.
Advantages of a Perfect Diet
Having a perfect diet gives you advantages in the form of stat increases. If you got only one nutrient, doesn't matter which one, you will always have a marginally increased growth speed.
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Consequences of Losing Your Diet
In case you lose your diet however, with no nutrients at all, you will get tons of debuffs and you will be temporarily infertile. So if you want to nest, make sure to have at least one nutrient.
Overeating and Vomit Sickness
When eating, watch your stomach and don't overeat. Should you vomit, you won't only lose the majority of your nutrients, hunger and water, but you will also suffer from vomit sickness which reduces all your gained stats from diets by 75%.
Case Study: The Pteranodon and Diet Restrictions
The Pteranodon serves as a prime example of how the diet system can limit gameplay. While the Pteranodon's flying and fishing mechanics are well-designed, the diet system restricts its hunting and scavenging potential. The current diet system rewards players for consuming specific AI creatures, while hunting other player-controlled dinosaurs or scavenging corpses often yields no nutritional benefit. This discourages opportunistic hunting and scavenging, pushing players towards a less engaging playstyle.
The Problem with the Current System
Not only are you not getting rewarded for hunting and scavenging but you are also even punished for doing so because you fill your stomach with “useless” meat that doesn’t grant any nutrients.Right now Ptera’s diet looks like this:nutrient #1 - AI stuffnutrient #2 - AI stuffnutrient #3 - AI stuff & Hypsi (the only playable on the list)Imagine this: You fly around and spot a pack of Utahs that has just taken down a Stego. Some Carnos arrive and challenge the Utahs - they want their kill. Pachys are also there to look for trouble because… well, they always do. A fight breaks out and it’s a dangerous situation for everyone involved. In that mayhem you suddenly see that the Stego corpse is unguarded. You take your chance, swoop in a rip a fat chunk of meat out of the corpse. An angry Utah realizes this and charges at you, but you quickly take off and fly away with your juicy Stego steak. A great gaming experience that requires skill, patience and timing to succeed. Yet all of that was pointless because that damn Stego, which you could never kill on your own, wasn’t on your stupid diet list. You should fly to the northern coast and hack at some slow and dumb AI turtles instead. In my eyes this makes absolutely no sense and completely goes against the mentality every game, especially survival games, should include: HIGH RISK - HIGH REWARD gameplay!!!The thing is carnivores don't have preferred food, they have preferred prey! That's a big difference. A cheetah doesn't hunt cape buffalos because it can't, that's a lion's job. But that cheetah would gladly take a bite out of that buffalo if it could… Carnivore diets atm are just limiting for no reason and it sucks!
Proposed Solutions
This could easily get fixed with just a few changes to the diet system, not just for Ptera but for ALL carnivores (especially small ones). Ptera’s diet could look something like this: nutrient #1 - all the AI stuff & Hypsi (and any other creature that’s smaller than Ptera as an adult)nutrient #2 - every playable that’s bigger and stronger than Ptera as an adult, basically anything Ptera can’t hunt unless it’s a juvenileReducing the amount of nutrients for carnivores in general to 2 would make things a lot easier to balance without making carnivore diets easier to obtain. The AI nutrient pushes a playable into a certain habitat and dictates the playstyle to some extent. For Pteranodon not even that is necessary, just put all their AI diet food into one nutrient. They should be able to live basically anywhere - along rivers, plains, swamp, coast… But in order to achieve a perfect diet you gotta take some risks. This also doesn’t remove Ptera’s existing “laid back” playstyle, you can still just live off AI just fine.And to those people who lash out and say “bUt pTeRa Is NoT sUppOseD tO bE a HuNtEr”To that I say the playable's capabilities should limit your playstyle BUT the game’s systems should not limit gameplay, at least not to that extent. I’m just tired of flying over corpses knowing that eating a silly frog would be more beneficial.
Read also: Weight Loss with Low-FODMAP
Balancing Realism and Gameplay
The diet system in "The Isle" aims to simulate the nutritional needs of dinosaurs, but it's crucial to strike a balance between realism and engaging gameplay. Overly restrictive diets can limit player freedom and discourage diverse playstyles. The focus should be on rewarding players for strategic hunting and scavenging, rather than forcing them into monotonous routines.
The Isle: A Brief Overview
"Experience fierce open world survival gameplay as you attempt to stay alive on an unforgiving island inhabited by dinosaurs! Hunt. Grow. The Isle is an upcoming open world survival game developed and published by Afterthought LLC where you play as dinosaurs. It is available on Windows and Linux computers. The project was founded and is still directed by Donald "Dondi" Wittich.[1] Players will be able to choose between several factions, including humans, non-avian dinosaurs, and other fictional creatures. Currently only dinosaurs are playable.[1] The Isle is most notable for being the first multiplayer survival game where you can play as dinosaurs, forming a new subgenre that would inspire contemporaries such as Beasts of Bermuda and Path of Titans. However it is worth noting that Saurian's development predates The Isle's, and it also planned to have multiplayer.[2] The Isle is made in the Unreal Engine[3], and launched on Steam as an early-access game on December 1st, 2015[1]. The game's development had began in mid-2014, with it initially gaining popularity from it's Kickstarter campaign on May 24th, 2015, with initial concepts focusing on humans capturing control points, and Dinosaurs being a secondary element. Despite a failed Kickstarter campaign[4], The Isle is now one of the best-selling Dinosaur games on steam, and has ‘Very Positive’ reviews[5]. The current ongoing development build of the game is known as "EVRIMA", while the older build that had been ongoing between the game's launch and 2020 is known as "Legacy". Legacy will receive no further development. Gateway, a map that is featured in The Isle. The only map playable in EVRIMA currently is Gateway. A Deinosuchus facing off against a Tyrannosaurus. The Isle is an open-world survival game where you play as Dinosaurs on a large island with up to 250 players.[1] Players partake in a multiplayer ecosystem, where Carnivore players hunt and survive off of other player's corpses and AI creatures, and Herbivore players survive off of vegetation and must survive attacks from Carnivore players, with Omnivore players being able to partake in both niches. The game also allows for Airborne and Semi-Aquatic playstyles. All players must eventually eat and drink, or will die of starvation. Vegetation is usually only reserved for Migration Zones and Patrol Zones, areas visible to other players, which incentivizes player interactions. Players must properly manage their Diet to gain benefits to Growth, stamina regen, and damage, which can all be aversely affected by a poor diet. Dinosaurs have different growth times based on their size, a base growth-rate can range from 1 - 8 hours, although growth time can be reduced by having a perfect diet. Stamina also only regens after a certain threshold (usually 50%) when standing up, and most dinosaurs have low stamina pools. However, the pacing in EVRIMA is quite fast compared to legacy, and many dinosaurs move faster than their body could support. AI creatures can spawn to aid carnivore players when hungry and unable to hunt others, although this feature is buggy and unreliable, with many players being unable to find AI at all. Map control is critical to the game's ecosystem, players must be wary of Deinosuchus being able to ambush at any site of water, and Herrerasaurus being able to ambush from any high object. When a player dies, all of their progress is gone and they must grow a new Dinosaur. There are very few quality of life features, such as a health bar or a map, this decision was made in favor of immersion. Many of these factors coalesce into the game being labelled as 'Hardcore' and 'Unforgiving'. The game currently has 3 playable builds[3]. The build that comes with Steam is the ‘Legacy’ version, which has been unsupported since 2019, though some community servers still operate. Accessible by the Steam beta participation feature, ‘Evrima’ is the build that houses active development and the most players. ‘hordetesting’ is a build that features upcoming content for testing purposes.[9] The Legacy build will eventually be replaced by EVRIMA, making Legacy no longer playable. There are currently 16 playable creatures in EVRIMA: Herrerasaurus, Maiasaura, Omniraptor, Deinosuchus, Pteranodon, Beipiaosaurus, Stegosaurus, Carnotaurus, Ceratosaurus, Dilophosaurus, Diabloceratops, Gallimimus, Troodon, Dryosaurus, Tenontosaurus, and Hypsilophodon. With Triceratops currently being available in 'hordetesting'. The Isle's original logo. The Isle's original key art, by Rodrigo Vega. The Isle's development history spans over a decade. Development began in mid 2014, lead by one Donald "Dondi" Wittich. The isle's Kickstarter campaign would go live on May 24th, [16] and have an end date of July 4th 2015, with it's goal being $50,000 in funding, claiming the game had already been in development for a year. "The Isle is a passion project of Don "Dondi" Wittich of Primal Carnage and Primal Carnage: Extinction fame. Early concept art for bases in The Isle by Rodrigo Vega. Nuerotenic Rex concept art, by Rodrigo Vega. Wittich set out to create an "Engaging dinosaur themed game with open and transparent development", which entailed modding, voting, and interaction with the developers themselves. The Isle was to be a multiplayer open world PC game where human players fight for 'resource points' for their factions and ward off aggressive dinosaurs. Human players would repair abandoned outposts and use them as bases, also referred to as 'key points'. The concept would be similar to Rust, except instead of players creating their own base locations, they are limited to a set amount of locations on the map, which they fight for control over. A large emphasis was put on humans, with dinosaurs being a secondary addition to disrupt human players, though cooperation between dinosaurs and humans was planned to be possible between Utahraptor and the 'Ranger' class.[4] For dinosaur players, they would begin as juveniles and grow to adulthood, eventually unlocking the ability to evolve into different 'Strains', such as Hyperendocrin, Tissoplastic, and Neurotenic, with future Strains being planned. Emphasis also was put on player freedom, and the amount of ways to play. The original concepts are in stark contrast to what the game would become[1]. It is unknown how The Isle was able to fund it's early development, with it being in development for roughly 17 months before it was made available for purchase on Steam. The Kickstarter had failed, and Donald Wittich's only known business revenue before this was a salary at a games company.[12] TheGamingBeaver The first known youtube videos on The Isle were gameplay videos of the demo, made by Silly Hyena and TheGamingBeaver, both being released on May 25th, 2015.[18] Most of The Isle's popularity can be attributed to TheGamingBeaver's Isle series.[19] TheGamingBeaver also has the most viewed isle video, "The Giant Crocodile Family!!! An Isle server in December 2015.
Development and Controversies
(There are many controversies surrounding The Isle's development and community, usually being poorly documented. This section is intended for archival purposes and not to relitigate any situations which caused harm. Please do not reach out to or harass anyone involved. In July 2020, Christopher “ParadymShift” Wistock, Marketing Director for The Isle, was accused of sending unsolicited nude photographs to a 17 year old, among other infractions/cases like chatting and/or sharing inappropriate content to other minors. [27][6] Donald Wittich, among other Afterthought Employees but mainly Wittich,[28] would initially deny these claims, shielding ParadymShift, and act hostile towards those who supported the allegations.[6] Days after the allegations would surface, Wistock was let go from Afterthought LLC by Wittich when the pressure became too much to handle. Wistock adamantly denied the claims. Many individuals claim to have witnessed a livestream from Wittich in 2018 where he admits he bullied someone to suicide, and then goes on to brag about it. Wittich has been accused of being racist, homophobic, ableist, and transphobic. It is alleged by many individuals that Dondi falsified his resume to get hired to work on Primal Carnage, wasn't actually capable of any work, and caused development of the original Primal Carnage's to cease by pushing his ambitious 'Recode' idea.[15][14] [13] This is also believed to be one of the 'disagreements in management' that is spoken of in several articles regarding Primal Carnage. In August 2020, Youtuber ‘SidAlpha’, who had helped provide evidence for Wistock’s allegations[6], would also put forth evidence that Wittich donated $400,000 of The Isles’s funds to twitch-streamers. RJ Palmer's original key art for the game, featuring 'Magnaraptor', a scrapped Strain. RJ-Palmer, an artist who had worked on The Isle in 2017, responded to The Daily Dot’s article about The Isle in 2020, with him stating that “The developer atmosphere was toxic and extremely uncomfortable.” and cited issues with leadership. Wittich has made several disparaging comments towards every other dinosaur survival game. Such as claiming he could create Saurian in one month, followed by an attempt to purchase it. [47] He falsely accused DeathlyRage, Path of Titans director, of 'purposefully damaging' The Isle's Legacy codebase after leaving the team.[48] He did this officially to the point where the entire Isle community was led to believe, and believed for years, that the "EVRIMA recode" was a result of DeathlyRage's "sabotage" rather than the truth being that Legacy's code was just a huge mess. To this day DeathlyRage is cited by some players as being the reason of the recode. He also falsely accused Beasts of Bermuda of being a scam and stealing The Isle's design for Pachycephalosaurus. (May not be 100% accurate, as I am having to rely on years-old witness accounts as sources, take the particular events stated with a grain of salt, but know that the overarching events did occur. Deathlyrage. Matthew Cassels, also known as Deathlyrage was the sole programmer for The Isle from 2015 - 2018/19. [4][49] It is alleged that he was not fully paid for all of his work done on The Isle. [50] Wittich invited Cassels' to live with him in the second half of 2017, and he allegedly lived there for the rest of his employment.[51][52] it was publicly known at the time that Wittich would flirt with multiple women in the community, even including other developers of The Isle, server owners, and fans of the game. In late 2018, Dondi's girlfriend at the time would hang out at Wittich's house one night. Cassels, under the impression that it was an ex-girlfriend, spoke casually about Dondi being with other women to her. Unbeknownst to him, he was telling her that Wittich was cheating on her, under the confusion of Wittich juggling multiple women. She allegedly freaked out and stormed out of his house while Wittich was starting a stream, which caused an immediate shutdown. However, as mentioned before, Cassels was the only programmer on The Isle, therefore development was now halted. Wittich would then make the claims that Cassels intentionally 'damaged' the codebase before he left, that Cassels was a 'bad engineer', and citing him 'being toxic' as the reason for termination.[48][54] [55][56] Wittich's claims about Cassels were mostly unproven, and widely believed to be slanderous, however, Cassels' toxicity had been previously noted.[57][58][59] RJ-Palmer, former artist for The Isle, made the claim that Cassels was ableist, but later retracted the statement, citing the belief that Cassels could have changed.[60] Former The Isle Developer 'Levia' claimed that Cassels' perceived toxicity was due to The Isle's stressful work environment.[61] It is widely believed that Cassels' termination was the catalyst for the game being remade in it's entirety, eventually releasing in June of 2020, initially dubbed 'The Recode', now 'EVRIMA'. As discussed earlier, this entire drama, which Dondi made very public in the official Discord, led most of the playerbase at the time to believe that Cassels was responsible for the recode due to his "sabotage". As a result, even five years later, many players will cite Deathlyrage as the reason Legacy was abandoned and the game recoded into EVRIMA, it's current state, despite this being false. Thankfully some players at least acknowledged their gratitude towards the game's main and only programmer, basically responsible for the game existing at all, and over time as Dondi grew less popular, the "sabotage" story became increasingly clearly fictitious. A prototype for the new angle. On Febuary 26th 2024, Dondi revealed in a livestream that a new camera angle was being tested. Dondi and KissenKitten, the game's managers, believed the previous (current) camera angle to be too forgiving, not scary enough, and equated it to omnipotence, with it being internally nicknamed 'The UAV'.[62][63] The new changes would've limited the camera's turn radius and greatly limited it's zoom, giving an almost first-person perspective to playable dinosaurs. The community's reaction to this was immediate and severe[64].
Diet system as a problematic feature
Since most people focus on other stuff atm like nesting, skins, development and toxic stegos (no clue how that's still a thing tbh…) I wanna take a moment and once again point out the game's most problematic feature - the diet systemMost problematic because the diet system doesn't only affect current gameplay, it will also affect furute systems. It already plays a role when nesting and it’s safe to assume that it will affect progression with the elder system and resistance to poison.