SO COOOL! I developed Scurvy due to a lack of Vitamin C and Night Blindness due to a lack of Vitamin A.
Multi-vitamins and gummy vitamins cleared the Scurvy up, but not helping for the night blindness. As far as I can tell, the only thing in-game to provide vitamin A is eggs, soooo… off to find some eggs.
oh neat this is in.
my characters are all addicts, so I live by vitamins anyway. but still
While the concept is nifty, to develop night blindness from lack of nutrients would take a seriously messed up diet. Just the occasion fruits and/or veggies should be enough to avoid the vast majority of such things… they were most commonly a problem for sailors, when they lived on the same exact thing for months at a time (and that thing was usually cheap and not very nutritious).
Most processed foods should even prevent diseases like this. We supplement most food with these basic vitamins to keep people from developing these kinds of things regardless of supplements and proper diets in the real world.
Good to know…
So livin’ on spider meat finally won’t be all that good.
Shouldn’t prove too much of the problem for me until fruit juice starts to go bad. Subway stations with drink vending machines tend to have plenty of juicey goodness.
I’m gonna be honest, this is a feature that I really didn’t want. Managing food supplies is tedious as it is; having to manage my character’s intake of each individual vitamin sounds like a complete pain in the ass. It doesn’t even add in-game benefits, all it does is add a new penalty to be avoided. I understand it’s more realistic, but at what point does adding realism take away from fun?
In my opinion, this mechanic should probably just be a mod. It has no benefits beyond roleplaying concerns, and I have a feeling a significant number of CDDA players are more interested in killing zombies and finding loot than they are in playing Food Pyramid Simulator 2016.
It’s jsoned from the start, so “no vitamins” mod will probably be easy.
I think it is fairly interesting aside from the fact that some of it needs to be balanced. I don’t feel like you should get brittle bones from going a week or two without calcium, is that how it works irl? Either way dairy products go bad really fast and eggs give very little calcium. Of course I am always for making things optional, everyone should be able to enjoy their cataclysm how they want to that’s part of what makes it great.
Gotta agree with Jedibob on this one, this just seems like a new source of unnecessary tedium added to the game, only a couple steps above “you need to poop or you die” in terms of fun. You add too many sticks and not enough carrots to the game, and eventually you’ve turned into another garbagey “manage your six thousand meters” shovelware survival game.
Is there any benefit to proper nutrition at the moment, besides “you don’t get scurvy?” The benefits from the old Health system were alright, but not great, and this seems like a step backwards in terms of enjoyability - existing only to punish the players that don’t want to pay attention to the mechanic. Are we going to be implementing immunodeficiencies if you don’t expose yourself to contaminants often enough as well?
Well, cata is a survival game where you RP, correct?
Maintaining a balanced diet sounds about right to me in this context - noone should live on just one food type for too long, and i find striving for variety in food enhances the cata experience: Now you don’t just eat to not die (if so, why not remove food completely? It adds tedium, right?) but you try to procure food of different types.
Also, you got the option to pop a multivitamin or two each week and never worry about it.
[but i’d suggest implementing a way to set specific drugs (or even foodstuff) to be taken frequently, then the player can just set the frequency and never worry about it, so long as he has enough of them]
Time periods like “Weeks” or “months” must be discussed with care, since a full year in Cata is 56 days by default. That time progression mismatch with real life might be a factor when discussing realism and/or enjoyment.
Personally I’m playing with the idea of a streamlined food mod where all the various foods/drinks are replaced with a generic “food ration” item, although there’d be a handful of issues to solve. I’m kind of sick of all the food variety and meal planning. However, it might be possible to come up with a device/tool that simply turns any sufficiently edible foods into generic nutrient paste. It could be a godsend to us who are tired of fiddling with food.
[quote=“Stekcs, post:10, topic:11742”]Gotta agree with Jedibob on this one, this just seems like a new source of unnecessary tedium added to the game, only a couple steps above “you need to poop or you die” in terms of fun. You add too many sticks and not enough carrots to the game, and eventually you’ve turned into another garbagey “manage your six thousand meters” shovelware survival game.
Is there any benefit to proper nutrition at the moment, besides “you don’t get scurvy?” The benefits from the old Health system were alright, but not great, and this seems like a step backwards in terms of enjoyability - existing only to punish the players that don’t want to pay attention to the mechanic. Are we going to be implementing immunodeficiencies if you don’t expose yourself to contaminants often enough as well?[/quote]
It’s a good point to make that health shouldn’t be another gauge to take care of but if you look at human nutrition and health itself, that too is about taking care of meters and gauges. Proper nutrition is basically extortion and blackmail - have a proper diet or suffer. Cata simply imitates certain aspects of life, so it might be misplaced resentment to dislike Cata because of that. And then again, you/we have every right to request a change for something pleasant, since gaming is voluntary suffering (extortion), unlike real life.
A complex health/diet scheme would certainly be new and unique in the gaming scene AFAIK. At least I can’t think of a single game with a complex nutritional scheme. Even if the scheme wouldn’t get much popularity, there would always be a number of (new) players and younger generation intellectual types excited about the fact. To create such a scheme would surely be an act of art and pioneering. To create it feels now to me almost like a race - it’s just a question of who does it first. Of course it’d be best as an option and a mod.
Game design isn’t about 50% sticks 50% carrots in every part of the game. It also isn’t a simple linear system where “you win” gives you 10 happiness points and “you lose” takes 10 points away. Victories don’t feel like victories if they’re given for free.
You don’t get a pat on the back for not fucking up. Except maybe in shovelware survival games.
The system will be balanced in other ways: some of the penalties from hunger and/or thirst will be moved into vitamins, so that starving from lack of calories will not debuff as hard.
Vitamins solve one of the significant problems with the food: it is bland as fuck.
The optimal diet is pure bread, pure biscuits or pure ant eggs (or ant egg products). There are tons of foodstuffs that will never get crafted because sliced bread is the best thing since itself. There is no reason to farm when you can just mill some acorns and feed self and a family of NPCs. There is no need to scavenge food because flour doesn’t even rot.
I’ll request from mugling (the dev who is writing the vitamin system) that he adds a no-vitamin mod when actually adding penalties for deficiencies (they do nothing at the moment).
They weren’t. The only recent change to health system itself is removal of health-granting vitamins, which is a good thing since vitamins totally broke it.
The health system never really worked. Before the wakeup messages, only leaky bionic cyborgs really noticed that it actually exists. You can be abusing drugs all day and you won’t see much of a change. Now that alcohol metabolism is a non-threshold trait available from the start, you can see how weak is it: you need a diet of ~30% alcohol to even drop to the “red” messages.
Though that’s a totally separate issue. Still, vitamins may help solve it by making deficiencies drop health and good vitamin nutrition boost it.
[quote=“Coolthulhu, post:13, topic:11742”]Game design isn’t about 50% sticks 50% carrots in every part of the game. It also isn’t a simple linear system where “you win” gives you 10 happiness points and “you lose” takes 10 points away. Victories don’t feel like victories if they’re given for free.
You don’t get a pat on the back for not fucking up. Except maybe in shovelware survival games.[/quote]
While I agree with this, I think it’s worth looking at mechanics in terms of whether or not they’re inherently fun or engaging as well.
This new nutrition mechanic isn’t difficult. Food as a concept in the game overall has never been difficult. Nutritional deficiencies, as they stand in the game, aren’t challenging to to deal with in terms of balancing your needs, but they are something that you have to deal with in your day to day now. Functionally, for me, basic nutrition has gone from “craft a food every few hours” to “craft a food every few hours, but this time it has to be something different.”
To me, this addition isn’t a new challenge, or something you even have to factor in when it comes to survival plans. It’s just an annoyance. I don’t feel like I’m contributing to a victory I’ve earned when I eat my daily apple, I feel like I’m doing mindless chores.
And, I mean - it’s in the game. I’m not gonna argue for its removal, I’m clearly in the minority in regards to opinion on it; but it’s something that I feel the need to voice disagreement about. There’s been a few additions to the game like this lately (different wheel types come to mind), where, at least in my opinion, you’re sacrificing streamlining of a system and enjoyably in the name of realism and challenge, and all you get out of the mechanic is occasional irritation.
Hmm. On the one hand it might make for some interesting stories about how your character found a specific food they desperately needed, and it certainly would add a bit more nuance to cooking other than “which of these is getting me the most food points for the time units and ingredients?” (my late-game characters tend to live on pemmican and, if they have giant ants to farm, haggis).
However, I can also see how it would be frustrating running into certain bottlenecks, like vitamin C and Calcium (which would usually be most easily found in very perishable things). Although that reminds me, I don’t think I’ve ever seen spinach in this game, and it would be quite a godsend for someone struggling with nutrition: spinach has calcium, vitamin C, vitamin A, AND iron. A character that can farm spinach and potatoes would probably be able to go a long way.
I can also see it creating problems with recipes that accept a very wide variety of inputs. What vitamins do “dried veggies” have? Would the game keep track of what you made each veggie from, or would we be adding “dried” versions of each fruit and vegetable? Pemmican and Woods Soup are also good examples: there’s a lot of different things you can potentially make them with, what vitamins do they have?
[quote=“Coolthulhu, post:13, topic:11742”]Game design isn’t about 50% sticks 50% carrots in every part of the game. It also isn’t a simple linear system where “you win” gives you 10 happiness points and “you lose” takes 10 points away. Victories don’t feel like victories if they’re given for free.
You don’t get a pat on the back for not fucking up. Except maybe in shovelware survival games.[/quote]
I don’t even think this is about any sort of “carrot to stick ratio” or anything, nor is it about making the game “too difficult.” Difficult can be fun, and I think that’s part of why I like this game so much. This is about presenting challenges that are interesting and engaging to overcome. I don’t think being given half a dozen new invisible meters to feed is particularly engaging on its own. Additionally, it brings a level of complexity that goes beyond even real life - a vast majority of people don’t bother checking the nutrition facts on their food, particularly anything beyond the “Calories” count, and yet serious vitamin deficiencies are exceptionally rare in first-world countries. Most people do eat a variety of different foods, but the level of micromanagement required to avoid such deficiencies is far lower than presented in Cataclysm.
I mean, yeah, the concerns about the current state of the food system are valid - it is too easy to survive on one single foodstuff, vitamins are overpowered, the health system was bad, and so on, but I think these individual vitamin meters cause more problems than they solve. They do make the player be more creative about where they get their foodstuffs, they do a good thing. However, on top of that, they add several more tasks of raw busywork onto the character’s plate, so to speak. Now, in addition to having to scavenge or otherwise arrange for a diverse supply of foodstuffs, they must carefully scroll through all of their food’s menus to ensure that all of their food has the right numbers attached to it, then when they eat, they must make sure to scan through all of their food’s attached numbers again to make sure they’re getting the right amount of each number, while remembering how much of all said numbers they’ve consumed in the last week to make sure all their invisible number meters are happy, and if they remember wrong or can’t find enough of a certain number? Well, enjoy your scurvy.
You know what? Let me see if I can come up with something that I think would work better.
[ul][li]Morale bonuses give diminishing returns when eating the same food multiple times over a certain period, which can turn into morale penalties, as eating the same thing over and over again would get boring pretty quickly. Morale penalties could also be given more of a sting, though that could possibly throw off other parts of game balance.[/li]
[li]Health penalties for failing to eat foods of certain “materials” for a long enough period of time. Food materials are currently just flesh and vegetable matter, so they’d probably have to be subdivided into a couple more categories, i.e. fruit matter, grain. I’m not sure how this fits in with the food group exclusion traits (lactose intolerant, hates meat, etc), but I feel there’s a better way to connect food diversity to health than vitamin juggling.[/li]
[li]Add another form of meat that is obtained when butchering unusual creatures, such as most “Giant [X]” creatures. The meat is safely edible, but it applies a significant morale and health penalty when eaten, as I’m sure a chunk of roasted giant wasp is neither as good for you or as appetizing as a flank of venison. This should also apply to ant eggs and the like.[/li]
[li]Buff morale bonuses for eating more complex meals significantly. A nice, hot, home-cooked meal of multiple ingredients is one of the finest luxuries left in the apocalypse, and should be treated as such. Getting the “Elated” stat bonuses from morale should be possible without a vibrator, massive amounts of drugs, or gamey tactics. Not necessarily possible from food alone, but possible.[/li]
[li]Cap the bonus given to health by vitamins. In fact, cap just about all sources of health bonuses in general. Doing one healthy thing repeatedly doesn’t by itself add up to a healthy lifestyle. Probably cap some of the penalties too, but relatively severe health problems can be left uncapped (i.e. drug/alcohol abuse). This should probably come with a rework of the benefits and drawbacks of high and low health, respectively, but I’m not sure how that particular aspect should be approached.[/li][/ul]
So what about that? It’s probably not perfect, and for all I know could be a bitch to implement (though if I ever get around to learning C++ I’d be willing to lend a hand), but honestly I think this would be a whole lot more interesting and realistic than giving the player six new invisible meters to constantly have to worry over and micromanage. It would probably scale better along the difficulty curve, anyway. Early-game players wouldn’t have to worry about it so much while they focus on basic survival (as opposed to suddenly getting hit with a vitamin B12 deficiency or something on day 3), while mid- to late-game players still have a reason to vary their food intake without the process of doing so being too tedious.
All of what you said sounds great, but this last bit, in particular. I’m actually avoiding the new builds over this… yes, I know that a standard day is actually closer to a week in real world time, but I could easily live on nothing but ground beef for MONTHS without developing scurvy (probably longer), so while, yes, it’s not a bad idea to have some things like that available somehow, it shouldn’t be a concern for, oh, at least 2 seasons, probably longer.
I could easily live on nothing but ground beef for MONTHS without developing scurvy (probably longer), so while, yes, it’s not a bad idea to have some things like that available somehow, it shouldn’t be a concern for, oh, at least 2 seasons, probably longer.[/quote]
In my experience the system is not that limiting and micro-heavy. I unknowingly played the ‘vitamin’ experimental this week. I play with 91-day seasons and did my first winter start. Well, reached day 50~60 before i learned about vitamins, and i faced no problems until then, without micromanaging my food. (probably helped that i found a couple of farms and lived on veggies for 10-20 days though)
That said, i also think that the concerns WRT to the new system are valid (more chores is not a good thing) so the point would be to make it work without introducing new chores. I see it as an improvement to the old system, but it still needs work to fix those things.
I haven’t really delved into it, but i’m thinking that:
[ul][li]giving to foodstuff multiple nutritional values (and slightly buff those to make it slightly easier), [/li]
[li]hiding the nutritional values of foodstuff from the item’s description (but make a book describe them roughly: meat → iron, etc.), [/li]
[li]making it easier to find good nutrition food, making multivitamins easier to find (and making an auto system to take a weekly dose of them), [/li]
[li]warning the player with small & visible mali before something really bad happens, [/li][/ul]
would all point towards removing the tedium, while keeping this significantly improved system - also punishing the worst offenders.
Regarding making the system totally cripple you after a month, I believe that is not that good gameplay. I mean, yes, by all means, give the worst malus after a month and tie it to season length so it scales, but do warn the player and start with small mali after 4-days. (i assume research was done on the time needed to develop scurvy, not disputing that)
Besides, IRL mostly noone really follows the whole set of nutritional do and don’ts, but the majority manages to live their way (i guess with small problems) without having to do something about it. This should be represented somehow.
Personally, “i feel the need” to eat a specific foodstuf, and this feeling is usually enough to make for a balanced diet. This ‘feel the need’ could be translated into ‘the organism requires a specific thing, and he knows that this foodstuf provides it’.
How to translate it in game terms though? Small mali, sure, but also some hints on what kind of foodstuff one desires??
Actually, it’s not yet in the game. At the moment it doesn’t have mechanical effects yet.
They aren’t balanced yet, it’s a rough sketch. It’s hard to have a meaningful conversation about balance of something that doesn’t even have effects yet.
The whole deal is making food something more than just “craft something every x hours, eat it, done”.
Food can’t be a difficult mechanic if all you need to care about is nutrition, permafood is a thing, food is relatively common, permafood is craftable from renewable ingredients and nutrition is all there is to food (health and quench are very minor).
Though on high item spawn worlds, it will probably boil down to just crafting something different.
The biggest problem is permafood, which guarantees (and will probably still guarantee) that after a while food stops being a concern and becomes tedium.
[quote=“Digital Vulpine, post:15, topic:11742”]Hmm. On the one hand it might make for some interesting stories about how your character found a specific food they desperately needed, and it certainly would add a bit more nuance to cooking other than “which of these is getting me the most food points for the time units and ingredients?” (my late-game characters tend to live on pemmican and, if they have giant ants to farm, haggis).
However, I can also see how it would be frustrating running into certain bottlenecks, like vitamin C and Calcium (which would usually be most easily found in very perishable things). Although that reminds me, I don’t think I’ve ever seen spinach in this game, and it would be quite a godsend for someone struggling with nutrition: spinach has calcium, vitamin C, vitamin A, AND iron. A character that can farm spinach and potatoes would probably be able to go a long way.
I can also see it creating problems with recipes that accept a very wide variety of inputs. What vitamins do “dried veggies” have? Would the game keep track of what you made each veggie from, or would we be adding “dried” versions of each fruit and vegetable? Pemmican and Woods Soup are also good examples: there’s a lot of different things you can potentially make them with, what vitamins do they have?[/quote]
I would love to see dehydrated fruit and vegetables maintaining the original vitamins of the component used. I know that the system is still being fleshed out, and a likely consequence of the new tag is that they won’t stack as well as before, but I think it adds a important component to the game. I would like to be able to use dried berries in recipes that require berries and the like, although an overhaul of that degree may not be worth the effort.
The last character that I had that survived for a long time had a base and farm set up. I literally spent an entire winter eating nothing but cooked acorn meal (and actually, I think it might have been the whole year on 30-day seasons). I tried farming out for the first time. I realized that if I am going to dehydrate everything, there is literally no point in diversifying after I get wild vegetables, rhubarb, and mushrooms. Tomatoes can be canned and V8 can be crafted as well, but even that takes time, energy, and effort when I literally could plant buckwheat and never have to worry about food again so long as I maintained on top of my harvests.
You raise a good point about the components being consumed in recipes. My character has developed both scurvy and night blindness. In addition, I think my health score has completely tanked 'cause I didn’t get any vitamin C. This is very unfortunate, as I have two limbs broken by spitter acid. One way that I am coping with the new system is to eat components raw (is there a recipe for cooked offal?). When you have a nutrient deficiency, it doesn’t make sense to craft something more filling and complex when you can consume raw materials with the same nutritional value and less satiety to gain more vitamins. I think it would require some effort, but I would like to see some conservation of vitamins between crafting recipes. I think a single serving of cooked meat should provide more vitamins than a single serving of jerky, as they use the same amount of meat in the first place.
Let me just state this explicitly: I love the addition of vitamins. It gives me a reason to diversify.
warning the player with small & visible mali before something really bad happens
A simple message like “Craving something sweet and fruity” could be useful if a player is neglecting a certain vitamin, and offer a small bonus when the craving is sated could be a great check to prevent players from accidentally mismanaging their nutrition. People get cravings for things that they’re missing out on in real life, why not implement it in the game if the same biological mechanism is accounted for? The message could be in the morale window, the status menu, and/or popping up in the event area.