Avast ye scurvy dogs!

[TheKobold]

[quote=“Coolthulhu, post:36, topic:11742”]Reminder that vitamins don’t do anything at the moment.

Oh wow, I just noticed Npc’s have vitamin needs.

They will probably be special cased into not needing vitamins when vitamin penalties start happening. Having them balance vitamins vs nutrition would require micromanagement.[/quote]

Ok, good to know.

[jcd]

I’m against adding “craving” hints, as they don’t happen in reality (I’m not sure what makes you think they do…),

i’m sorry but i do get cravings. Not expecting everyone’s system to work that way, but it does work for me. I wouldn’t write about it otherwise.

I mean i may not eat bread for a month, but then i do get a craving, and go eat 1-2 loafs within two days.
Same with fruit, when i skip 'em, i miss 'em and then i feel a strong urge to eat something sour.
Same with meat and vegetables, though i usually won’t ommit them for long enough to feel that way.

Anyway, to the point:
I have played a bit with this feature on and what i find hard to obtain is calcium. But i do take multivitamins regularly and try to both hunt and farm if possible.

I do believe that 3-4 days to fully develop a meaningful problem is too fast. It may be true IRL, but IRL one would go eat some greenery (even some types of grass or tree leaves in small amounts like cats do) with his meat and balance it out, unless really none were available. That must be why scurvy was encountered and identified in sea voyages where really no options where available.

In-game this is not possible and i’d argue against it being possible (a bit too much micro for not much gain), so maybe it could be a bit abstracted by just being a bit more lenient with vitamin needs.

Catch the worst offenders and promote variety in food, sure. But it should not be “do this manually or die/cripple yourself” kind of option, meant to be honoured every two days. That’s a bit severe.

[BackwardsomeN]

Gotta say, I am generally most content lurking for any roguelike I get addicted to. The most recent updates (Kudos to Remyroy for the CDDA-Launcher) included the vitamin business and I was sufficiently irritated to register just to bitch about this. I dislike this new addition. A lot.

[spoiler=frustration fueled rant ahead]
Somebody spilled their gahdam OCD nutrition simulator into my post apocalyptic deathmobile playland. Now fair is fair, and the largest reason this grinds my gears is I already neurotically try to balance my PC food intake woods soup, meats, combined with two plant based food items, and daily vitamins. NPC better not pick up that vitamin before I can, or there will be blood. And now I start getting low health red text on wakeup all the dam time. It’s infuriating for me. What is more, though there is information on what vitamins are provided by specific foods, I have no earthly idea what the depletion rates are or my current value, nor my maximum. Just a wakeup red text saying, hey BackwardsomeN stop ineffectually faffing about. Whatever you are doing with diet is bad. You should eat better!

How? Damn you, how? Do I need to convert to veganism? Consume only free gahdam range zombie? Maybe if I convert to cannibalism, I can be sure to get all the nutrients I need because people are made out of them.

In game I have feedback on the dam variable friction generated by different size tires. I have warning popups based on temperature and windspeed based cooling. There are visual and text based reports on sound in the immediate environment. No matter how many different types of ammo there are, you can check to see if the weapon you found uses any of them. But new vitamin land? Sum total of feedback is morning red text.

And don’t trot out that this is based off real life, cravings don’t happen shite argument either. The game is necessarily an abstraction, and as a result has to provide player feedback to allow for reasoned choices. If the player needs to have the coders gahdam knowledge base in order to intelligently operate this new system, then the abstraction is at an inappropriate gahdam level. I am not a dietitian, and I do not formulate daily vitamin tablets in my home kitchen. I do not know it, and I do not want to know it. The relationship between deep nutrition simulation and extra dimensional black ooze puppeting corpses and kicking off a zombpocalypse is tangential at BEST. Managing abstracted caloric value and morale bonuses? Fine. Either give far more information or take it the hell out of the core game. Add Nutrition Simulator OCD edition as a gahdam mod, not default.

Inarticulate rage based noises

I have never empathized with a Lewis Black rant more than right now. Now that I have that out of my system, I am off to github to figure out when Nutrition Simulator 2016 infected my damn roguelike.

[_k1]

Humanitarian gets complete vitamin from his food. That’s a good idea.

[woofinator]

Yeah, I tend to agree with BackwardsomeN. New magazines and ammo system makes sense in the game, lift kits and such really helped balance out vehicles, but I really don’t feel empathetic with a guy who can install laser beams and solar panels into his own body but can’t go 3 days without vitamin C.

I’m gonna be honest guys, I’m in college, I spend a sizeable chunk of my disposable income on alcohol and illicit substances and a MUCH smaller portion on food. And the food I do buy, ha, let’s just say that even if you use 12 Cata days proportionately to 3 real life months, I eat WAY less fruit and vegetables than I need to in Cataclysm. In fact the first winter I spent in my apartment, I actually googled “Scurvy” to see if I should be worried.

IRL I do have a crazy immune system and metabolism and haven’t thrown up due to an illness since I was in 2nd grade but still, I basically eat bread/meat/dairy/beer unless I’m at my parents house or am at a friend’s or a girl’s place for dinner. And I don’t even like white milk. Dairy=cheese.

Now if I never post on the forums again after today you guys know what happened, as I’m really tempting the patron saint of 18th century naval diseases here, but I’m thinking maybe a little more leeway should be given to the player on this.

[Pumbletron]

Regardless of diet, I have never had a problem with the nutrition stuff as long as I carry multivitamins.

[BeerBeer]

Fuuh…hhk… I just realized protein intake isn’t measured. Vitamins yes, but not protein. I guess we would then have to take into account the various absoption rates of various protein sources. The protein from raw egg gets absorbed the best AFAIK, but, you know, salmonella risk… See also the term “biological value”, which pertains to protein absorption efficiency. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_value. Generally the protein (amino acids) from vegetables don’t get absorbed/utilized very well, while protein from meat is utilized better (or more readily).

I’m rambling on about this because I expect to see vitamin or protein (or insert your nutrient name here) absoption deficiencies introduced as traits or mutations, meaning that some characters wouldn’t be able to get their vitamins/proteins even if they’d eat themselves full, meaning that they’d REALLY have to watch they eat.

Seriously though… protein. Veganism/vegetarianism, or lack of protein, should have consequences (mainly on physical strength).

[Coolthulhu]

Protein could be one of the values to balance, but it would most likely be rather easy to satisfy. A diet of white bread would be enough to get the required protein mass (though not the variety). And bread+biscuits is the most efficient diet in the game right now.

Strength debuff for vegetarianism would fit in a broscience mod, right next to “you need 300g of proteins per day or you’ll go catabolic”.

[Malaxxor]

Contrary to what other people may think, I really enjoy the idea of vitamins in Cata, if only to make a varied diet necessary. However, I also think that the systems still needs some tweaking before it “goes live”.

The main one certainly is the rate at which vitamins decay. As others pointed out, scurvy for example is a disease that only develops after longer periods of time without Vitamin C, not after 5 days without fruit.

The second biggest concern probably is the way the information is parsed to the player. It’s nice to see what food gives how many vitamins, but as a player, I have absolutely no idea how many vitamins I need on a daily basis. As someone on this thread already mentioned, a “% of daily need” would be much better and probably even more realistic. You’ll find exactly that percentage on many items of food in real-life.

Thirdly, though this isn’t really a pressing concern: pre-cataclysm food should have bigger values in vitamins. AFAIK, even with a one sided diet, you can’t really get diseases like scurvy in the modern western world, as most foodstuff contains enough vitamins to prevent that. You probably have to eat only one item of food for weeks to develop any kind of serious disease.

[TheKobold]

It takes on average 4 weeks for scurvy to develop after you run out of vit C. If you divide that by 6( the time scale of the game is 1/6 normal) you actually get less than 5 days…

That being said. I still think its too fast for a game mechanic.

I would like to see it scale with season length but I think Kevin already said that won’t happen… Booo…

[deoxy]

[quote=“TheKobold, post:47, topic:11742”]It takes on average 4 weeks for scurvy to develop after you run out of vit C. If you divide that by 6( the time scale of the game is 1/6 normal) you actually get less than 5 days…

That being said. I still think its too fast for a game mechanic.

I would like to see it scale with season length but I think Kevin already said that won’t happen… Booo…[/quote]

Food needs in general don’t scale with season - if you set seasons to length 1 (one day), so that that one day represented 3 months, do you really want to have to eat three months worth of food in that one day? I didn’t think so. Vitamins are the same.

Also, there are trace amounts of lots of things in lots of places. Long before we knew what Vitamin C even was, the only people who got scurvy at any significant rate was sailors. Magically, people eating almost any variety of foods other than hardtack and other ultra-cheap perma-food somehow managed to avoid it the VAST majority of the time. Getting scurvy should be harder than NOT getting scurvy.

Some of the other ones were a little more common, but even those aren’t HARD to avoid. IRL, Vitamin A deficiency can be avoided with 2-3 doses a YEAR.

The concept of adding this stuff to the game isn’t terrible, especially as a means of adding meaning to the food system, but that’s the sort of thing that should A) matter very little for a good long time, and B) be fairly easy to manage, as people have managed it decently well almost by accident since the dawn of civilization.

I actually think it should probably just be another “health” stat - one for “have you been actively mistreating you body” (drugs, extreme lack of sleep, certain types of injuries, poison) and one for “have you been getting some nutrition other than just calories”. Living nothing but junk food for months on end? Yeah, problems. Living 90% on one decently healthy item (meat,bread,veggies) with the other 10% being from the other two categories? You should be pretty much OK.

[TheKobold]

Oh I agree, which is why I said it happens too fast. Not to mention the fact that once we started producing processed foods we began injecting them with pretty much all the trace minerals and vitamins we needed.

As for scaling for season length. It does often seem like I eat a weeks worth of food every day or two to keep full. I myself am a relatively active person IRL and one meal and a couple snacks get me through the day. But in game I may eat a stack of sandwiches or the like to keep full plus another meal or two. I could be misinterpreting the portion sizes though. Moot point though.

The big thing is that these easily avoided in real life deficiencies are cropping up way to fast. I mean you can fend them off. I have a current character for two weeks now and they haven’t had problems. A lot of my food is aspic and vege aspic and offal. But part of that is actually keeping an eye on my vitamin count with the debug menu, because I wanna see how they work.

[kevin.granade]

The balance I’m interested in is based on real durations, such as the 60-90 day period outlined in the document I linked. This single week period before symptoms is n’t going to stick around, but on the other hand, some people can stand to calm down a bit. mugling is putting a lot of work into this, and a lot of the posts in this thread aren’t productive.

[TheKobold]

I’m glad our suggestions are being taken into account. Yes some of us are not offering productive suggestions but that often comes about when there is a lack of communication about how it is being handled or what suggestions or complaints are being addressed. Also there sometimes isn’t much more a layman can do than offer a complaint since many of us are just gamers and not coders. Getting upset because people are upset doesn’t help things either.

[BackwardsomeN]

Yeah, while I admit, my complaint is not formatted to be a highly productive bit of feedback. I do not know how I could have made it more clear that it was not intended as a balanced or constructive criticism. I summarized what the actual takeaway was out of the spoiler and left my whining underneath a spoiler warning that it was a rant.
While my post may not be the most constructive, I think I did get across exactly how vexed I am, and why. Which while potentially disheartening I would think is valuable feedback to get.

Then again, this is the internet, so pedantry and rage are in no short supply.

[TheKobold]

If people really didn’t like something they wouldn’t complain they would just stop playing. Its when people complain that you know that they care about the game because they are disheartened at losing something they liked.
I thought your rant was pretty lighthearted and very tongue in cheek.

[Coolthulhu]

Vitamins system is currently very experimental.
So experimental that it doesn’t have in-game effects.
It will change significantly before it does and will also get a mod disabling it.

[Deinos]

Out of curiosity, what caused Cata characters to become so much more vulnerable to scurvy etc. than real life modern humans? I was thinking that the lore explanation is probably that the Blob is leeching nutrients out of your body, hence the way that you suffer months worth of vitamin deficiencies in just a few days. Subtle!

That being said, the level of irritation at mandatory, unavoidable, and blatantly unrealistic nonsense about scurvy simulation looks like its time to shelve DDA for a month or two while we wait for this to become optional. Also really screws up Lab characters (moreso than usual) and a few others. No offense.

Reminds me of how in Dungeon Crawl, the devs likewise have been in a frenzy to punish playstyles they don’t like.

[Coolthulhu]

That being said, the level of irritation at mandatory, unavoidable

Reminder that vitamin statuses are totally experimental, do nothing at all and you’re panicking without even trying to find out what is going on.

I will repeat once again because last time I explicitly said it it wasn’t enough:

Vitamin system doesn’t work yet, it does nothing at all.

[Gergoric]

If the system works we could separate the food-stats for nutrition and how filling the meal is. A filling meal would stop you from being hungry but if you don’t get enough calories, you’ll gradually get weaker and you’ll eventually die. If you stuff your stomach with candy on the other hand you’ll get overweight. That way you can survive on a diet of straw to fill your stomach and sugary drinks for the calories. (You’ll probably die of scurvy though)