Energy, satiation, and hydration

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

Although this has been discussed multiple times in the past and will be again in the future, I felt the need to add my own ideas to the pile. So let’s get our turnout gear against the flame war, because I want to talk about the food system.

To start of, this is not directly about the controversial vitamin system. However, it does propose more simulationist aspects the game. As of writing this post, the two main components to the consumables are hunger and thirst. These are tracked independently of each other, although many food items affect both. Especially the hunger value seems to be a combination of satiation and caloric intake, which to me seems a bit simplistic in contrast to the complexity and depth that otherwise permeates this game. My proposed armchair game designer suggestion is as follows.
The main food system, not counting vitamins and other potential macronutrients should be comprised of three stats: hydration, energy, and satiation.

Hydration would be conceptually simple, how much water your body contains. The difference from the current thirst would be that there is no hard cap on how much you could drink. Upon drinking excessive amounts water poisoning could be possible, but otherwise the water loss should be proportional to your current hydration. If you had a lot of water, your hydration loss would be higher as the body expels excess water through multiple means. If you were dehydrated (with associated debuffs) your body would conserve water. If hydration reaches 0, the character dies. This system would discourage the practice of drinking large amounts of water between periods of willing dehydration.

Energy would represent the caloric content of a food item. Similar to hydration this would be calibrated as 0 meaning a dead character. This could also be uncapped stat, with moderate diminishing returns on uptake for high energy levels, with additional penalties as the character grows fat. Low levels would of course also give debuffs from starvation, yet metabolism would lower to conserve energy.

Satiation is the fullness of the stomach. Both food and drink would have a satiation value partially based on their volume. Drinks moves quickly through the intestines which can be modelled as them having low satiation in comparison to their volume. Satiation would be capped, but would not be hazardous at low levels. Satiation has the role of acting as limiter to food and water intake, and to affect mood. Being hungry is a miserable experience, but is in itself not lethal assuming access to water and calories.

This could further be leveraged by mutations and bionics. A predator gorging on large amounts of meat between longer periods of dormancy? A bionic serving as an artificial camel hump, reducing water loss at high levels of hydration?

Please discuss.

2

You mean encourage, at least compared to the current system, where not drinking doesn’t slow down dehydration.

additional penalties as the character grows fat

I really don’t like the idea of forcing the player to manage excess calories in an apocalypse situation. Sounds like one of those ideas that “make sense”, but then end up actually not doing so because of some weirdness (say, conflict with vitamin system, unfinished implementation or something like that) and result in everyone getting obese, despite working hard all day and having grievous wounds to heal.
DDA is prone to this kind of mis-simulation due to sheer size of the game.

Satiation has the role of acting as limiter to food and water intake, and to affect mood.

This could work if we had an auto-eat system. That is, ability to queue items for the character to eat in spare time.
Otherwise it would end up annoying, taking more from the game than adding to it.

But then, for it to work, we’d need to push it to unrealistic levels of severity.
It would need to be so strong, that some kinds of food would not grant enough calories to offset the satiety they cause, forcing the player relying on those to stay below “well fed” level of calories.
If you could just be satiated by eating for calories and drinking water, the satiation mechanic would be barely noticeable.

Unreal World has this kind of satiety system. It isn’t bad, but Unreal World is pretty strict with food, so the added difficulty matters more than the annoyance. In DDA, food grows everywhere and starvation is very easy to avoid, so player comfort has to take priority over tweaks to nutrition system where they are in conflict.

3

yeah, can’t base fatness on how much they eat because shit like “just got into a fistfight with 30 zombies and won” can happen. beating 30 people to death with your bare hands has got to be an intense as hell workout.

4

You mean encourage, at least compared to the current system, where not drinking doesn’t slow down dehydration.[/quote]

Good point, although I imagined it as having diminishing returns when drinking water when already slaked without hard capping hydration. With gradualy increasing penalities to stats and morale from dehydration, I hoped that would discourage players from perpetually keeping their character in “water saving mode”, but it could probably be gamed depending on the nature of the dehydration penalities.

I really don’t like the idea of forcing the player to manage excess calories in an apocalypse situation. Sounds like one of those ideas that “make sense”, but then end up actually not doing so because of some weirdness (say, conflict with vitamin system, unfinished implementation or something like that) and result in everyone getting obese, despite working hard all day and having grievous wounds to heal.
DDA is prone to this kind of mis-simulation due to sheer size of the game.[/quote]

Yes, excess calories should probably not be a disadvantage to the player. The phenomena of fat being a problem is a modern issue. However, I still feel that there is some merit to “bulking up” an energy reserve to survive the winter or a siege. The Hibernation mutation could be an extreme manifestation of this.

This could work if we had an auto-eat system. That is, ability to queue items for the character to eat in spare time.
Otherwise it would end up annoying, taking more from the game than adding to it.[/quote]
Satiation was not meant to nerf the ability to eat. In my head satiation would progress at the approximate rate of the current hunger, with calories being more long term.

[quote=“Coolthulhu, post:2, topic:13867”]It would need to be so strong, that some kinds of food would not grant enough calories to offset the satiety they cause, forcing the player relying on those to stay below “well fed” level of calories.
If you could just be satiated by eating for calories and drinking water, the satiation mechanic would be barely noticeable.[/quote]
Granted that excess calorie penaleties should not be a problem, I would rather frame it as a buff for energy dense foods. Think of the three 3s rule of thumb: 3 minutes without air, 3 days without water, 3 weeks without food. While the caloric value would be more variable than the current health stat, it would still be a bit more long term than hunger or satiation. You could stay indoors during the winter with water and candy and still survive, but as candy is not filling, you have to choose between wasting high energy food to feel full or tough it out with painful hunger for the duration. The “not enough calories per satiation” problem should be rare, probably if you live on raw wild vegetables and spend the entire days clearing rubble. Wastebread and mushrooms could probably be the prominent “more satiation, little calories” consumables.

Satiation acting as a limiter was not meant to be an extra hassle for the player, but a way of keeping calories uncapped while preventing the player from eating an entire grocery store and negating the need for food for two seasons. You could say that the current hunger stat IS satiation specifically for food with calories being assumed as avaliable as long as you are full.

Does this make any more sense? Thanks for the feedback.

5

Excess calories could speed up metabolism. Currently, extra metabolism causes more heat generation, but only when it is needed. This would simulate insulating properties of fat without bothering the player with having to measure the fat, and it would be self-balancing.
That way player could store some extra food and gain something for it.

Granted that excess calorie penaleties should not be a problem, I would rather frame it as a buff for energy dense foods.

It can’t really be a buff for energy dense food, since they would be the ones with lowest ability to fill the stomach.
Unless there were actually 3 stats: calories, actual fullness (including water) and feeling of fullness (mostly affected by fats). But that would be an overkill.

Satiation acting as a limiter was not meant to be an extra hassle for the player, but a way of keeping calories uncapped while preventing the player from eating an entire grocery store and negating the need for food for two seasons.

The problem is, fully uncapping calories with no penalties would eventually work like this, no matter the satiation. Consuming the entire grocery store over the course of 2 weeks should not result in 2 weeks of complete lack of requirement for calories afterwards.
Calories need to be capped somehow, though not necessarily hard-capped.

6

let’s not forget for starving/satiation two things:

  1. satiation is not a thing, it’s a feeling, it’s a concept we come up with to invent things, stomach is empty, you’re not sated, stomach isn’t full, but is partly full with easy to digest food, that’s sated.
  2. starving and fatness, people are FAT as a rule these days, no one has to hunt and kill their food anymore, some people do, but it’s because they like to, it’s 100% unrealistic for starvation to be possible in under around a month and a half.

i’ve fasted personally for weeks, you ignore an empty stomach long enough and it gives up and stays quiet again, at least for some more time, willpower is the only limiter there until starvation becomes realistic.

if i’m entirely honest, the game at current really pushes it with calorie intake at the moment, i’ve not actually starved to see how badly it is recently though to be honest, but if you’re pushing for slaked and well fed, you’re probably eating 3-8+LBS of food a day, AT LEAST!

7

well, you have to remember a survivor is probably doing heavy activity, daily. running around carrying like a hundred pounds of crap through a city WHILE battling the forces of the undead. these activity levels cause you to burn your fat reserves a lot faster then someone just sitting at a computer. so yes, you can go a month without eating if you just sit there, but you can’t go a month without eating if you are constantly lifting, moving, fighting, healing, etc. all those actions need energy and building material.

8

yeah, that’s entirely fair, if we assume they didn’t really have months to pack on the pounds then like 15 days is more than reasonable to be able to tolerate easily without food on what fat stores you initially have.
i still feel there’s a bit of a disconnect with calorie value and amount of food however.

take cooked chunk of meat for example, if you’re hungry (yellow/red) and eating only those for solids i want to say you have to eat 6-10 to fill back up entirely, not sure how much meat a chunk of meat is, but i’d assume it’s probably roughly a chicken breast or so of meat, that’s several pounds of meat intake in one sitting, in real life that much would probably be fatal, in cataclysm that’s everyday before bedtime.

9

Is the required food and water not still set for the 14 day seasons, making 4 days about a month?

10

Required food and water is set rather arbitrarily, but is generally no more than 3 times too high or 3 times too low.
A regular survivor won’t need more than 300 nutrition units per day. Assuming surviving is an active lifestyle but not heavy work, we can say that 1 nutrition is ~10 kcal (in the code we assumed it’s closer to 8.7).

A whole bread is 160 nutrition, so it would be ~1400 kcal at 750g - lower than IRL. But then, said bread is made from ~140g of flour, which would be no more than 600 kcal IRL (assuming perfect digestion+absorption).
A piece of cooked meat would then be ~115 kcal per 100g. That’s actually pretty accurate for moose meat.

For water, we got 200 quench per liter of water, meaning 1.5L per day. http://www.watercures.org/survival-hydration.html says minimum could be about 1L per day. Relatively close here.

11

[quote=“Coolthulhu, post:10, topic:13867”]Required food and water is set rather arbitrarily, but is generally no more than 3 times too high or 3 times too low.
A regular survivor won’t need more than 300 nutrition units per day. Assuming surviving is an active lifestyle but not heavy work, we can say that 1 nutrition is ~10 kcal (in the code we assumed it’s closer to 8.7).

A whole bread is 160 nutrition, so it would be ~1400 kcal at 750g - lower than IRL. But then, said bread is made from ~140g of flour, which would be no more than 600 kcal IRL (assuming perfect digestion+absorption).
A piece of cooked meat would then be ~115 kcal per 100g. That’s actually pretty accurate for moose meat.

For water, we got 200 quench per liter of water, meaning 1.5L per day. http://www.watercures.org/survival-hydration.html says minimum could be about 1L per day. Relatively close here.[/quote]

you lost me a bit in the math there, but i get what you mean, i have honestly wondered what is the calorie intake ingame ideally anyway, if i had to guess i’d say most survivors operate on a 5kcal to 10kcal daily diet, but that is with all the effort of scavenging and all that other stuff so a little above normal compared to someone who’s setup in an LMOE and can afford to relax more.