Spices are so plentiful it's annoying. Cooks have told me that not many recipes yet use them. I've already given away 5000 spices, and I still have almost 3000 left! Not to mention the fact that lazy or forgetful people use spices as their sole source of nutrition. The abundance of spices is actually bad for cooks, see?

So, could we maybe make the spices a bit more rare? (I've already had times when I've harvested four or five spices in a row...)

They're very useful. They're a non decaying food source, and you apparently have a lot of them. If you find you're starving while wandering the Razines, miles away from Bob and even then you have no gold to your name...just check the rift!

Sustenance plus a good 50 or so of those are pretty cool. Also, it freaks people out when you eat 50 of them at once. Muha.

Geez, no wonder they were providing no nutritional value. I was trying to eat like 10 at a time (with sustenance, granted, but still). I'd resigned myself to giving the things away to cooks. I agree, though, they need to be called "ridiculously common spices" or something. I get more spices than herbs, I swear.

So how does collecting spices work exactly? I've got over 250 of them just from picking up spices that have been randomly lying around on Astral.

Well, see, you don't actually collect spices specifically - you randomly pick the buggers up when you're harvesting herbs. As in, PICK GALINGALE "You have got some rare spices as well!" It doesn't reduce the herb count in the room, just means one more pick to get the thing.

I was thinking perhaps there could be a few different kinds of spice, found when harvesting different things. A certain one in the forest, another in the mountains, one on the astral, etc. It'd be more interesting (and fun!) than, "Oh look, another spice. Great." "Really? I'm a cook, what type is it?" "Uh... whatever type you want it to be, babe! *rowr*"

That way you could have things like vanilla beans, cinnamon, saffron, salt and pepper, and maybe something freaky for astral, like... those little rainbow hundreds and thousands The alchemical equivalent, sugar, is a hell of a lot more rare, as are the equivalents for other tradeskills (so rare I don't even know what they are!) but spices are literally a dime a dozen - or sovereign, as the case may be

So... just an idea, changing 'rare and magical spices that are whatever you want 'em to be' to something more fun, specific, and realistic.

It's so hard for cooks to get some of the other comms, it's nice to have a plentiful one. And shame on all of you eating spices. Cooked food is so much better, and it makes me richer.

Hey, we need spice, like in Star Wars. Rping with addictive drugs anyone?

They tried that in Achaea, with something called Gleam. It worked pretty well, as I recall. Because it's one of few bad things that can have ANY lasting effect on a character. Everything's so easily curable it's almost impossible to have any lasting effect, but if someone spiked your food with a permanentish affecting drug...very interesting.

Ohhh, nice.

Wait, gleam? If I recall, one of the drugs on SW was Glitterstim. *peer achaea*

Pff, like ACHAEA stole it off STAR WARS. You know as well as I IRE is completely original in everything it does

Introducing Gleam to Achaea was a good idea. Not that I play there, but I hope there's something like that over here. How about...Sparkle?

Don't make me lightsaber you in half.

And Lucas stole it from Dune, and has admitted as much. No idea is original, there is nothing new under the sun, everyone steals from everyone.

edit/ Oh, on topic...I also have a few hundred spices, from my short time as a berry-picker in the early days, before I found the fine art of forging, and a few from Astral as well. I haven't even managed to give them away, as of yet. And with carrion, I haven't eaten real food since...well, I'm not sure I ever have, heh.

Gleam on Achaea was a hoot - some of the best times I had was secreting the stuff to people in the middle of a fight and then snapping them and forcing them to eat it and get addicted

I just love how people with carrion can get by with that alone, where foraging is practically useless.

Forage isn't useless, you just need to know where to look. Personally, I get by on it perfectly. The trick is to A) use the monkey totem in the trees, and Use the ethereal. Provided you're not starving when you start, it should keep you going just fine.

I thought spice was a drug in Dune. How dare you defile the name of Dune - pervert!