Food, starvation, and WTF I just ate a whole moose

[Hyena_Grin]

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.

[Tawarochir]

Right now, your character can spend 21 days without food before dying

Wat.

We just need to change the messages, after reading for an hour the game tells me I’m “very hungry”.

I think I wasted me pop tarts.

[Zaweri_Runewright]

Being fat does not really slow you down… I know because I am fat, and still run faster than most people at my school. It makes you weary faster.

[Blackopsman9999]

Being fat makes other fuckers run faster when you sprint at them XD

[Drunk_in_Space]

The high food requirements kind of make sense if you play with the default seasonal length setting, 14 days, as from this perspective, one day’s consumption is equivalent to what should actually be almost a week.

Of course, if you try to play with a realistic number of days in the year, then it does indeed seem pretty silly.

[Binky]

Changing the time for the different hunger messages to come up makes a lot of sense.

Until looting/mechanics come in to deal with the over-abundance of food, there is never really a case of running out of food, so making it seem like you’re constantly starving is kinda needless. Mechanics like fatness/fitness/calories and stuff I feel would get too complicated, and probably involve a lot of threshold surfing to make sure you stayed in one category or another.

[Birdie]

I’m not sure having a big gameplay difference between male and female PCs is a good idea?
It could be a good idea… dunno.

[Zireael]

[quote=“Drunk in Space, post:23, topic:5883”]The high food requirements kind of make sense if you play with the default seasonal length setting, 14 days, as from this perspective, one day’s consumption is equivalent to what should actually be almost a week.

Of course, if you try to play with a realistic number of days in the year, then it does indeed seem pretty silly.[/quote]

Maybe the requirements should be counted “length of season”/14?

[Hyena_Grin]

It would be wonderful if the game calculated hunger rates based on the length of the seasons… but I don’t see that happening. Sounds like a lot of work at this point, with so many food items in the game.

[system]

It would be wonderful if the game calculated hunger rates based on the length of the seasons… but I don’t see that happening. Sounds like a lot of work at this point, with so many food items in the game.

That’s why I suggested tracking calories. It would be trivial to implement (though time-consuming initially). and it provides a hook on which people could build. For example, drinking dirty water could give you a tapeworm and increase your calorie consumption. Likewise, doing a lot of physical activity would increase the need for food, while sitting at home reading would greatly decrease it.

[Zireael]

Tracking calories is too much work for too little gain, just use abstract numbers.

[kevin.granade]

What we’re doing is having a simplified burn rate and a simplified energy extracted from foods, how’s that different from calories from a practical point of view?
I’d like to eventually tie energy expended to the type of activity you’re doing, but that’ll take a good bit of work.

[system]

What we’re doing is having a simplified burn rate and a simplified energy extracted from foods, how’s that different from calories from a practical point of view?

Well, it’s easier. Rather than have an arbitrary set of numbers, we have a whole real world on which to draw numbers to make assigning them easier. You can easily look up the caloric value by weight of any food, as well as the caloric burn per-hour (pro-rated per minute for game time) of everything from sleeping to fighting. It removes guess-work, and also makes for a more authentic-feeling estimation of the amount of food necessary. In the real world I don’t have to guess how many pork chops to carry in my back pocket to make it through the day. Since we have to assign numbers to these values anyway, it makes sense to me that we would relate them to real world numbers where possible. After all, a lot of work has been put into assigning authentic weights to every gun and bullet; why not food? The thing about using real caloric values is the recalibration only needs to be done once and continues paying dividends thereafter.

[Sir_Scarfalot]

[quote=“StopSignal, post:7, topic:5883”][quote=“John Candlebury, post:6, topic:5883”]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.

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.[/quote]

Not sure if someone said this already, but i2amroy is working on an overhaul of the health system, so that’s going in.

[Bonevomit]

So, if someone were to do a mod to improve the food handling of Cataclysm, they would do something like:

[ol][li]Cause the character to burn calories based on how strenuous the actions they preform are.[/li]
[li]Standardize the nutritional value of all foods in cataclysm to caloric content.[/li]
[li]Have food consumption needs be reasonable for the players chosen season length.[/li][/ol]

What else should be on that list? Don’t get too detailed because I’m just talking basics.

I have a question myself, how about age? What is the age group of the model for our survivor?

[Ice-o-metric]

If you want to add fasting, i think just having Hunger shut off at some stage and you just getting tired increasingly easier would make sense, and probably even be cool and somewhat accurate.

Actions having different tiring/food costs is quite a cool idea, but it would take quite a bit to code well, while not really adding that much to the gameplay. It seems more the domain of ‘nature survival’ than ‘zombie survival’

[KA101]

Not to mention that this would also add even more complexity to the “eat nontraditional stuff” mutations. I don’t care to work out how many calories are in rotting meat, tainted flesh, blob globs, and so on.

[Zireael]

I said already, just give them random numbers and not calories.

[Obscure]

Why not? it can be a relatively arbitrary number, but in most countries (and in New England, where i live) packaged food has a nutrition label. why not call the food values calories, and make it so you can read labels for their calorie content. obviously, you cant easily discover the content of rotting meat or blob globs, but it’s there in packages if you want it.

I also like the Idea of a slightly more realistic hunger time-frame. maybe not as large of one, but definitely longer than it is. I don’t think it will negatively impact gameplay as bad as some people think.

[Zireael]

[quote=“Obscure, post:37, topic:5883”]Why not? it can be a relatively arbitrary number, but in most countries (and in New England, where i live) packaged food has a nutrition label. why not call the food values calories, and make it so you can read labels for their calorie content. obviously, you cant easily discover the content of rotting meat or blob globs, but it’s there in packages if you want it.

I also like the Idea of a slightly more realistic hunger time-frame. maybe not as large of one, but definitely longer than it is. I don’t think it will negatively impact gameplay as bad as some people think.[/quote]

You can already learn the nutrition values via V menu, so the only thing remaining is adjusting the hunger clock to account for longer seasons.