I do regular fasts, usually for two weeks at a time. My record is 37 days. Most people can go 30 days without lasting effect, and can survive for up to 60 days without consuming a bite. In DDA, the amount of food you need to eat is astounding and ridiculous. I eat AN ENTIRE MOOSE a day. My suggestion is to make eating and starvation more akin to real life.
For the first few days without food, you get increasingly hungry and distracted. By day three, it’s all you can think about. But starting somewhere between three and five days without eating, the hunger disappears as your digestive system shuts down to conserve energy. At this point you get very weak and any hard work is likely to make you feel faint or dizzy. At around a week without food, however, your body shifts over entirely to starvation mode, which has two effects. First, your energy use drops, which means your body becomes super-efficient. Second, you start getting a lot of energy as your body prepares you to do whatever is necessary to get more food. At this point, you feel very good, very strong, and your mood is great. This will continue until you begin running out of muscle mass to cannibalize (for tissue repair), at which point you will become too weak to do anything and soon perish.
Currently in DDA, food requirements are so ridiculous that we wake up starving to death from every sleep. I would like to see food use cranked down, and starvation handled in a more realistic way. Making food much rarer and allowing for long-term starvation would increase rather than decrease the post-apocalyptic mood.
Increasing food rarity has been suggested but has been seen as not something that is wanted as it’d be too unrealistic without changing the lore (its set days after the apocalypse and there was little time for taking food/looting/etc) so food has to stay at roughly the same level as it would be in current times. I don’t like this personally, but it’s the way things are going.
To combat this, there’s been other suggestions such as stronger morale penalties for not eating good food and illness from lack of nutrition.
I do agree with you, but it’s the kinda change that seems unlikely unless there is a consensus to change the lore.
Why not change the lore for this? Before the game existed I am sure the lore was quite shitty XD
"And so whales, began furiously coding… Taking only 1 masturbation break an hour…"
I agree that our survivors are currently a bit on the ridiculous side when it comes to nutritional requirements, however, I’m pretty sure we can also heal a shattered leg within a couple days using a splint, and can grow horns, wings, tentacles and a tail with the help of ‘a little radiation therapy’ or chemical adulteration… so the survivors just might be running hot on a cellular level too.
Though, I don’t see an overabundance of food sources early game to be a huge issue, preferring to imagine that the early game should be the ‘easiest’ time to survive, before true scarcity sets in and the monstrous and environmental threats start steamrolling their way across the landscape.
However, if you wanted to add another mechanic to control that food availability we might consider NPCs and monsters seeking out and eating food. I’ve always wanted to see a pack of canines, rats, or crows (or even zeds trying to ‘reclaim resources’) tearing at corpses and garbage while trying to slink past unnoticed.
Right now, your character can spend 21 days without food before dying, without taking sleep into accont (hunger increases more slowly while sleeping IRC so its probably more like 30 days without food before dying . I consider that for gameplay purposes, this makes sense. I think that the actuall problem is derived from the fact that famished seems to imply that you are about to die from hunger, even though thats not nearly the case; you still have something like 20 days before dying.
Now saying that you eat a complete moose a day is very misleading. The problem with that possibly lies on the fact that either Moose give way to little meat when butchered (even when you have low skill) or that raw meat gives too little nutrition. Basing myself on the fact that if the wiki is correct, you gain 288 starvation per day (without taking sleep into account; If you take it into account its probably something like 150 or so) this is equivalent to eating 6 pieces of cooked meat, which considering the amount of exercise your character does (walking and fighting all day long hauling 30kg of stuff in your back is not an easy task) is a reasonable amount.
We should have a fat system for this: if we have less fat in our bodies, we just live 3 or 4 days before dying. But if we have a normal person’s fat quantity, we should live like 20 days without eating. With penalties of course.
I know this game is meant to be as realistic as possible in an apocalypse world, but if we nerfed hunger and did the effects as you suggested, people could exploit the use of it and not eat for ages. I could live in my little LMOE shelter with infinite water + purification tablets and survive for 5 weeks, or however long you proposed into the character actually dies. That’s just not cataclysm. Hunger is a factor meant to push the player; I’m not against your ideas in any way, I actually quite like them, but it just seems to easy.
So how about this: some sort of option in the cataclysm menu to change how hunger works? It would be a large project, perhaps. But this could whet the appetite of people bored of having to slay and chow down on every animal they come across in order to survive. I dunno. Seems kind of dumb now that I think about it, because it’s pretty much giving cataclysm an ‘easy mode’, as such. Buuut whatever. Just an idea.
We should have a fat system for this: if we have less fat in our bodies, we just live 3 or 4 days before dying. But if we have a normal person’s fat quantity, we should live like 20 days without eating. With penalties of course.[/quote]
And when you go all vacuum cleaner on a vending machine you actually get the effects of eating a lot of unhealthy food. More fat added, maybe even a sugar crash.
I think a straightforward way to deal with this in a realistic way is to track calories. You’ve already got an abstract “food value” number for food; replace it with actual calorie values. Then assign realistic calorie values to every action a player takes. You start with a base 1200 calorie per day use for women and 1500 for men. Then keep a running tally of all the calories used for walking, carrying heavy weights, fighting, and so on. If you’re hiding in a basement trying to get over the DTs from your alcohol addiction, you should be burning a lot fewer calories than when you’re going all Fafhrd on the zeds with a fire axe.
At the end of the day, you end up with a calorie deficit or a calorie surplus. If you have enough days in deficit or surplus, your build changes. You’d have something like this:
[quote=“Jakers, post:8, topic:5883”]I know this game is meant to be as realistic as possible in an apocalypse world, but if we nerfed hunger and did the effects as you suggested, people could exploit the use of it and not eat for ages. I could live in my little LMOE shelter with infinite water + purification tablets and survive for 5 weeks, or however long you proposed into the character actually dies. That’s just not cataclysm. Hunger is a factor meant to push the player; I’m not against your ideas in any way, I actually quite like them, but it just seems to easy.
So how about this: some sort of option in the cataclysm menu to change how hunger works? It would be a large project, perhaps. But this could whet the appetite of people bored of having to slay and chow down on every animal they come across in order to survive. I dunno. Seems kind of dumb now that I think about it, because it’s pretty much giving cataclysm an ‘easy mode’, as such. Buuut whatever. Just an idea.[/quote]
Well, hunger should give you a HUGE nerf to everything.
The calories stuff sounded okay, but you lost me with the rest of it. Being malnourished would affect almost every stat negatively as you wouldn’t have the energy to function, so you wouldn’t be able to carry things or run quickly. Also, retailoring clothes sounds like extreme tedium imo.
I think all of this can be made with little tweaks. Tweaking down the nutrition given by junk food and how much meat you get off animals (due to them being in bad shape from zombie attacks and whatever) would be a good start. It doesn’t need to be unrealistic, but shunting it downwards would mean that food wasn’t quite so abundant. Giving hunger stronger penalties would also help a lot too.
I’ve suggested this numeral time and it’s always been kinda shot down, but I feel moving a lot of the current food stock to fresh food would help. Currently, you can get like 20 cans of soup/beans/whatever after a few houses and never need to worry about food again. My thought is that moving it to fresh food (which goes off, but perhaps more slowly due to GM) means that the early game is easy for food, but it gradually gets harder as most has rotten away. This can be explained lore wise that more people were going further and further towards fresh food - this is already happening in the real world, so it’d make sense.
Stronger morale penalties for junk food/boring food would help as well, but I think that can only be explained so far as in a survival situation ANY food is going to make you happy, so It’d be kinda weird if you got massively depressed for just eating to stay alive.
Lets have consistency eating a food get boring.
Just slowly remove any moral boost the food gives by 1 for each meal of it you eat, till it reachs 0.
Add back a point for every time you eat something different so you can get back the joy from eating it.
You should get a few messages telling you that your getting board of x food and that you want to eat some thing different.
I would point out the op is neglecting more than a few things.
You can survive without food for a reasonable amount of time, as long as you are still imbibing salt and a few vitamins on a regular basis. And you dont do anything at all. Attempting actual manual labor while not eating for prolonged periods of time (eg, days) will have you passing out on a regular basis among other shitty side effects. Having a zero sodium intake while attempting to do anything and not eating will pretty much cripple you and will kill more than a few people. Hunger strikers generally imbibe nothing but water and salt. Or else their hunger strikes dont last that long. Being in a hot environment where you sweat will make you need more salt and water. Being in a cold environment will make your body burn MUCH more energy. Without a large calorie intake, cold can kill you very fast.
Also, while some humans have survived for up to 76 days (allegedly) without eating, many more have died after 40 or so, this is under hunger strike conditions, meaning, you basically do nothing but lay in bed keeping at a reasonable temperature.
Trying to eat regular food directly after a long fast can also do you some damage if you arent careful.
On the other side: ITS GAMES PEOPLE. Realism is pointless if it isnt fun and/or doesnt work with the mechanics. There is currently more food laying about in cataclysm than you can poke a sharpened pole at. Needing less food just takes some of the scavenging away and thats one of the mainstays of this game.
[quote=“Funk, post:14, topic:5883”]Lets have consistency eating a food get boring.
Just slowly remove any moral boost the food gives by 1 for each meal of it you eat, till it reachs 0.
Add back a point for every time you eat something different so you can get back the joy from eating it.
You should get a few messages telling you that your getting board of x food and that you want to eat some thing different.[/quote]
This is a good idea. Same for the idea of moving to fresh food and/or penalties for canned food.
I think people just respond to the hunger messages with an urgency that is probably not warranted.
Granted, it doesn’t take too long to get to the point where the game is telling you that you are STARVING! so naturally at that point you are pretty much prioritizing finding food over everything else. I myself have never waited around to see how long it would take for ‘starving’ to turn into something else, like death.
This is, admittedly, pretty much how people react to hunger in real life. So maybe it’s perfectly fine as it is.
The problem, as noted, is that there is simply so much food around that it is extremely rare that you ever have to worry about finding out what happens after ‘starving.’
There’s no looting happening, but what about a mob that wanders around gobbling up food items? Perhaps mutated giant rats that can pretty much eat anything. Whole cans of beans, etc.