Enjoyment variation (probably not feasible)

[kuros]

This would probably be a large amount of work for a fairly low payoff, but as I was staring at my Craft Food menu, it struck me that some of these foods were just inherently more enjoyable than others, and that didn’t strike me as particularly realistic. People have preferences, man! Preferences vary. Is EVERYONE going to enjoy drinking kompot to the exact same degree? Of course not!

I don’t know that it would really be worthwhile to add some kind of randomization to the Enjoyability of various foods, though a Finicky Eater flaw might be fun for the kind of people who like have characters that hallucinate.

[dissociativity]

A simplistic version of this would be a ‘Picky Eater’ traits, makes your character enjoy enjoyable foods more, but dislike plain foods with low enjoy or negative enjoyment more.

[mlangsdorf]

Isn’t that the gourmand trait?

Adding a bunch of flags to all the foods, and then adding code to mildly adjust enjoyment based on the flags and some minor traits doesn’t sound difficult. Adding the flags sounds tedious, and maintaining them sounds like a hassle. I don’t think this minor feature improves play enough that anyone has felt like going through the grind of developing it.

I have a hard enough time going through the grind of developing features that I know will make the game more enjoyable for me. If I want my survivor to really dislike drinking tea and really like drinking orange juice, I can simply not drink tea and drink orange juice whenever I have it. Updating the json to give minor game benefits and penalties for drinking OJ and avoiding tea seems like too much work.

[Trigon]

It’s all subjective. Personally I would happily eat sauerkraut out of a jar all day. I acknowledge most people would not do the same.

My curiosity would be how it’s decided what an individual character likes. Because I imagine many people wouldn’t be enthused To start the game and answer a questionnaire about their character’s favorite vegetable.

[kuros]

Trigon has found the heart of my thought, I think. Actually coding this kind of variation in preference wouldn’t be worth the time for the value gained. On the other hand, talking about how to code such things might be a fun and valuable exercise for newb modders, or folks like me who haven’t coded in several decades.

Disassociativity’s suggestion only enhances the existing “problem” of preset enjoyment values (the fact that Fancy Hobos are ALWAYS more enjoyable than a beer feels odd to me), when the thought I had was about modeling individual tastes.

What about repetition implying preference? The more frequently you eat something, the more you develop a taste for it. Or go the schizo route and have the enjoyment change randomly at random intervals? “I’m just not in the mood for that right now.”

I dunno. I’ve played my first character who has made it to winter, and I have a cargo carrier worth of drinks that I never touch because they’re not water. Just trying to think of ways that I could encourage my character to drink them.

[redxlaser15]

–What? Do you know not know how to taste bud? If you eat something more and more you’ll start liking it less and less! I’ve hard people say something along the lines of: “I’d love to eat chocolate all the time!” Do really want to literally eat the chocolate all the time? No. Because you can get tired of any food.
–Roman noodles are completely tasteless for me after my childhood. I used to love that stuff, but I had it too often. It’s even worse for oatmeal! Once upon a time I ate it almost every morning when I got up; Now it makes me feel like vomiting. Two food that used to taste amazing, I now hate. So no, eating the same thing would eventually make you less happy. To the point of literally vomiting. Not unlike this sandwich that I was eating which I discovered just now to be painfully dry. Stinkin’ kids not closing the bread package.
–The only exception is for those people who literally are incapable of tasting food, then only texture matters. You can add a trait for that, which makes it so you never get an mood boost but never get an debuff for it either.

P.S. Sorry if any of that sounded rude or angry. I find it crazy that you’d think that about food, and I simply wished to explain what is wrong with that thought. It is possible that you are not a massive (and very skinny) food lover, as I am, which would make this much more understandable to me. Or, it could simply be my autism.

[darktoes]

I think he was more aiming along the lines of beer or coffee being an acquired taste. If all you have access to is oatmeal and you occasionally find a poptart, you’d start to REALLY enjoy poptarts.

I see two possible ways to go about this.

1. A list of randomly generated liked and disliked foods at character creation. Eating liked foods would multiply their enjoyment by 2, disliked foods would have their enjoyment halved. For that to work you would have to make sure that ingredients are properly tracked, so you enjoy a smoothie more if it’s made from your favourite fruit.

2. Employ a system where enjoyment values get buffed/debuffed depending on the length of time since you’d had it. Sitting and eating 7 bars of chocolate shouldn’t give you the same morale boost as eating them individually over a week. That said, having a steady supply and being able to enjoy a strawberry or two every day would make you look forward to it more than just having one show up here and there.

[TheMurderUnicorn]

I think both of those options are excellent, though I lean towards the second as the most effective way to emulate how actual tastes in things work and shake up players.

How many of you eat the same thing over and over in-game? I’ve literally been eating cooked buckwheat for almost three years. If my enjoyment dropped gradually over time, getting worse with each consumption, maybe I’d actually do something about my diet.

Then again, morale isn’t the most robust system, easily worked around, but what else could you do?

[darktoes]

You underestimate the effects of truly low morale. If it gets low enough it stops you from reading and crafting, even drops your speed. Make the morale penalty from eating the same thing over and over strong enough and you could cripple someone completely for something like that.

That said, the vitamin system does something very similar. Just nobody uses it.

[kevin.granade]

Ancient historical context:

Preferences, Morale, and Exposure

This is a proposal for a new system to change how much morale you gain from items and situations in game. During character creation, you are presented with a “preferences” tab, which lists a variety of categories, the defaults for the likes and dislikes of your character, and the extremes to which they like or dislike them. The options are Loves, Likes, Neutral, Dislikes, and Abhors. Some categories may have a limited selection of these options. Items and activities will come with two preferen…

Preferences System: Loves/Neutral/Hates

Right now, all of our characters like the same things, and they like them the same amount. I propose the addition of an additional screen during character creation, “Preferences”. Moving things towards the “loves” category costs points, and moving them toward’s the hates category gains you points. Moving things to the “hates” category earns you fewer points than you gain by moving things to the “loves” category as a general rule. Here’s an example: [table] [tr] [td]Likes[/td][td][/td][td]Ha…

[TheMurderUnicorn]

I suppose I don’t truly know the effects of super low morale, per se. I’ve had morale so low that I couldn’t work on my vehicle, but my point was more that I could remedy that situation with a joint, some snacks, and a vibrator.

EDIT: Although, now that I think about it, I guess that’s sort of the point of morale. It’s not something that would have effects beyond how well you function, and raising morale in real life is often as simple as the things I listed before. I assume, anyway, as I’ve only used one of those three things in my life.

[Aabbcc]

The problem with a randomly generated list is that it would lead to really weird lists, like, you absolutely hate something, but if it’s canned then it’s awesome.
Or you love water beyond anything else, but put it in a fancy mineral water bottle and you vomit.
Or wildly varied likes/dislikes values for various chocolate stuff

Handling it via ingredients mitigates this some, but not completely, and would need manually handling each food for the code, since I don’t think we have a way to differentiate, code-wise, between “this stuff is made of other stuff” and “this stuff can only be found directly”.

Hmm, you could assign everything a multiplier, and then you could do something like take the base enjoyment of the item, then multiply it by the average of how much the person likes the item and the ingredients it was made of.

But then again, this also falls into the trap that if you find an item that you can also craft, your enjoyment of it would be very different than your enjoyment if you had crafted it, possibly wildly different.

---

Another way to handle it is by manually dividing all food in somewhat-sensible groups (or using tags), and just randomly assign a multiplier to each. That way if you like chicken eggs, you’d also like other eggs, as well as some egg foods like scrambled eggs.

[darktoes]

I see your point, but I think you might be overthinking it somewhat. I see two easy ways of doing it.
First, just make it so it can only generate complex recipes. For example Deluxe Scrambled Eggs might be your favourite food, but you detest Riesling wine.

Second possibility is, like you said, do it on an ingredient basis. Probably easiest to just do all the ‘base’ ingredients as possibilities, and check if something is one of those things or was made from it, like scrambled eggs being made from eggs. You could probably narrow it down a lot by only including common ingredients, like only having a like/dislike for bird eggs since most people haven’t eaten enough spider/ant eggs to form an opinion on them. You won’t actually know what found items are made of, so it’s probably okay to neglect the morale bonus if a found smoothie might have your favourite fruit in it, but you don’t know for sure and can’t really tell.

I think it’s important to make it fairly specific, since that’s how people generally are in real life. Nobody thinks apples are the best thing ever, regardless of whether they’re raw or cooked in some dish. People tend to just have favourite specific dishes, which generally tend to change over time anyway. It might be way easier to add a craving, where your character randomly decides they feel like eggs and you get a morale bonus if you eat eggs before it wears off.

[kevin.granade]

to be clear about that historical context, I was against “buying” likes and paying for them with dislikes, because there’s no tradeoff to be made there, but I’m fine with randomly adjusting likes andI dislikes.

I agree with @darktoes that it seems fine to tweak individual items, I’m not too concerned with the “likes water but dislikes mineral water” thing, becausethat doesn’t seem like a contradiction to me, some people do really like one specific kind of water and not others.

[Trigon]

The idea of randomized enjoyability that changes from day to day got me thinking though. What if there was a huge bonus multiplier for something your character was really craving? I think as a player randomized enjoyment would be frustrating and unintuitive “What? Last run my character LOVED meat jerky. Now this one hates it?”

Whereas I would feel really rewarded if my toon went “man. I would kill for some Spaghetti with meat sauce.” Then by satisfying the craving you get a longer lasting bigger buff than you normally would.

[kuros]

P.S. Sorry if any of that sounded rude or angry. I find it crazy that you’d think that about food, and I simply wished to explain what is wrong with that thought. It is possible that you are not a massive (and very skinny) food lover, as I am, which would make this much more understandable to me. Or, it could simply be my autism.

This is a conversation about simulating food preferences to a degree that would be untenable to actually implement. By all means, get ludicrously defensive over your positions But yeah, I was thinking about acquired tastes like coffee and bleu cheese. Things that start tasting terrible to you but then you grow to like them.

Though, I think it would be even more fun to create a system that accounted for both. Some tastes, you start with low enjoyment and then get larger buffs from it over time, the same way that I do in real life with Bleu Cheese, and eventually if you eat it constantly, you get sick of it.

For that to work you would have to make sure that ingredients are properly tracked, so you enjoy a smoothie more if it’s made from your favourite fruit.

There’s somebody making a mod for a Gluten Free perk, IIRC, wherein it was also suggested that we properly track what ingredients each specific food is made out of, so you can track whether or not it was made GF (And by “we,” I obviously mean all of you actual coders, as directed by all of us armchair game designers duck), so now there’s multiple reasons to consider this questionably beneficial resdesign!

Employ a system where enjoyment values get buffed/debuffed depending on the length of time since you’d had it. Sitting and eating 7 bars of chocolate shouldn’t give you the same morale boost as eating them individually over a week.

Yeah, that’s definitely a part of what I’d like to see. Something to push against TheMurderUnicorn’s three years running of completely ignoring the food crafts menu. THREE years of roasted grains? That, sir, is an awful lot of fiber in your diet. Makes me glad that the other end of the digestive system isn’t programmed into the game.

That said, the vitamin system does something very similar. Just nobody uses it.

I am currently using it. However, I have nearly 100 multivitamins, so it isn’t nearly as complicated as I had thought it would be.

Ancient historical context:

To be explicit, I am DEFINITELY not suggesting we do that. Heck, I’m not actually suggesting we do ANYTHING except nerd out over a minor aspect of the game.

The problem with a randomly generated list is that it would lead to really weird lists, like, you absolutely hate something, but if it’s canned then it’s awesome.

I don’t really see that as a problem, but after reading what y’all have said since I last checked in, I would personally lean towards a system that changes over time and is affected by how often you eat things, with a bell curve on the effect, possibly with some seed value randomization, so that some games, you want to drink fancy hobos all the time, and other games, you’d be better off doing a shot with a beer chaser.

I think you might be overthinking it somewhat.

Allow me to point out the humor of this statement in a thread that is specifically about overthinking a minor aspect of the game. ~snicker~

by only including common ingredients, like only having a like/dislike for bird eggs since most people haven’t eaten enough spider/ant eggs to form an opinion on them.

I feel like the spirit of the game would be best exemplified by creating a system wherein, in one game, your character develops an odd, fetish-like preference for eating giant spider eggs, and in the next game, gets to the point where even the idea of eating giant spider eggs makes them physically nauseous.

Nobody thinks apples are the best thing ever, regardless of whether they’re raw or cooked in some dish.

Strong disagree. I will try pretty much anything that has mangos in it. I will revise my entire meal plan for a day in order to save room for a new mango dessert that I’ve just heard about.

I really like the inexplicable cravings idea. And then implement ANOTHER system where you could get implanted with Predator eggs, and while it incubates in you, you get the exact same craving messages. If you indulge the first system’s messages, you get a morale boost. If it’s the second, you nourish the parasitic monster inside you and it explodes out of your chest!

What if there was a huge bonus multiplier for something your character was really craving ?

As a fan of the Zombieland quest for Ho Hos, I am a huge fan of this suggestion.

[darktoes]

Strong disagree. I will try pretty much anything that has mangos in it. I will revise my entire meal plan for a day in order to save room for a new mango dessert that I’ve just heard about.

You’ll TRY anything with mangos, but if you found a dish that was mixed mangoes and dog shit, you wouldn’t eat it would you? I’d imagine there’s probably some methods of preparing mangoes that you prefer over others, and some dishes you outright dislike.

[Trigon]

Also. Off topic slightly. But I use the vitamin system and love it. I wish more survival focused games did it honestly.

[kuros]

Whoa, holy escalation, batman! You started with the premise that “nobody likes apples regardless of whether they are raw or cooked.” I replied that I like mangos and will try “pretty much anything” with mangos in it. Not really sure why you took that as hyperbole.

In reference to the conversation at hand, if we were implementing a system that tracked by ingredient, the dish would get a bonus for having mangos in it, and a malus for the inclusion of feces. Though, again, I’m pretty happy that the game doesn’t try to simulate the entirety of the digestive system.

[Trigon]

I do think tracking ingredients farther could be interesting. Specifically for things that the mod is going to do, but it’s usefulness is arguable currently.