Well that’s true, but even then it doesn’t compare to the amount of time you spend digesting it.
Sometimes food bonuses last overnight for my current character. I might have a trait that helps with that, no idea what their current traits are.
A lot of food is down to tradition/upbringing as well as genetics/personal taste.
So having a system that allows some “forced” food preferences could apply. The players character would start to like certain foods more, or get used to them, them more of it they eat. Likewise, some foods would become boring if eaten all the time.
I guess it would depend on the base moral gain in game, as to how much or how quickly it changes. Most people could eat chocolate or icecream all day, and only extreme overindulgence would put them off, and even then only temporarily.
It could easily be done in code AFAIK, some sort of multiplier or debuff when the same food is eaten again, depending on if it is a moral bonus or negative effect.
There are problems with approaching ‘getting bored of food’ that way.
From a simulationist point of view, you aren’t likely to dislike having burger for dinner if you had it for lunch. Couple days in a row? A little tiring, a week straight? Pretty tiring, but repeating a food once shouldn’t have much, if any effect.
From a game point of view, you have the problem that there’s food that has a lot of nutrition, filling you a lot in one action, and there’s food that you need a several of in order to sate your hunger.
In real life, you’d just pile a bunch of the later in a plate and call it a single ‘meal’, but in game terms, if you implement an innocent ‘you ate this x time ago, so you’re bored of it’, then it is going to heavily penalize this kind of food.
Rendering things more complicated to automate, you can’t just adjust the formula with the item’s nutrition to account for this because many candies, deserts and the like also have low values of nutrition, so under that approach, you would never get tired of those unless you ate your fill several times in a row.
You can’t even use the “junk” material to filter them out and treat them separately, because there’s sweets that aren’t junk food, and there’s junk food that is actually meant to be a full meal.
This is why I was proposing to keep track of having eaten stuff for the last 2~3 days, and using that to tell if you’ve eaten something for a few days in a row and penalize the fun of the item.
Sorry if that was unclear, the penalty for repeatedly eating the same food should accumulate rather slowly. If you do as much as alternating among a group of 5 or so foods and occasionally supplement with something else, you shouldn’t encounter significant penalties. If some if those foods as re “favorites”, it should be even more forgiving.
Sorry for the necro, I was just ruminating on this and wanted to have the context of previous conversation around the topic.
It’s worth noting that “getting bored of food” is not necessarily a universal trait. I know plenty of people who eat the exact same breakfast (and others who eat the exact same dinner–particularly people not born in America of an earlier generation), every single day, and have never grown tired of it and probably never will on any sort of timeframe that makes sense on CDDA scales. I’ve been places where certain staples are a part of every main meal, and having a meal without them would be very weird (and getting tired of them basically unthinkable).
Going in the opposite direction is a thing, too. My experience with things like alcohol and coffee, for example, is that they taste pretty awful the first time, but then you grow an appreciation for them.
That said, what brought all this up in the first place was that I noticed in-game when I was drinking that “Sports Drink” had enjoyability -1, and I just reflected on how I’ll personally chug Gatorade with gusto in real life and love every second of it. It’s just an interesting little tidbit reflecting how personal preferences of the developers are reflected in a product (which I don’t want to imply as judgment, just as an observation).