Going from "Engorged" to "Peckish" in 2 hours is stupid [Warning: Bitter sarcasm]

[darktoes]

feeling slightly hungry

Plus, it’s informal and British if I’m reading that correctly. That strikes me as a little bit odd considering we usually tend towards formalish language.

[kevin.granade]

Let me know when you find a better word, until then it doesn’t really matter how british or informal it is.

[darktoes]

I’m tempted to go for “sated” but I worry that people are going to confuse that with the original usage of sated, which was that you were full and couldn’t eat anymore. It might be worth changing the message for stomach fullness 0.5 to 0.85 to sated, keep engorged for 0.85 to 1, and then just leave the UI empty for 0.5 or lower unless the player is actually starving.

I think the issue here has a lot to do with the fact that peckish means “slightly hungry” to a lot of people, so when you go from “so full I literally can’t fit food in my stomach” to “I’m a bit hungry” in 2 hours or so, you naturally assume that

1. You’re going to be very hungry in another two hours or so.
2. The food you ate is pretty much gone.

As we know, this isn’t the case, but if it confuses enough people that we’re having a debate over it, perhaps we can look into alternatives that are more completely obvious.

[Stone]

How about craving? That implies hungry but not hungry xD to be honest though the word isnt the problem, the presentation seems to be the issue from what I’ve read.

[Erk]

Craving sounds worse than hungry to me.

[frac]

Given that the new hunger system is essentially a huge gift to new characters (free backpack worth of space for storing food) it does seem weird that there’s so much confusion. Maybe you’re right, its the American usage of peckish? (I.e. quite hungry.)

Synonyms of peckish | Thesaurus.com

Fed or fine could work instead? Not that any change is really needed, the literal meaning of peckish seems perfect for the circumstances.

[TheZoneWizard]

Throw words out the window and sh!t and get off the pot. Swap the whole wording system out for the bar system we use for garments. (humor intended…but half serious)

Easy to understand and gives the same idea across every language. Colors even work well enough to detail death is near when red.

[Trigon]

They’re already color coded though. Peckish is grayed out to denote a sort of middle ground. I guess the word could be replaced with “fine” but it tells you even less than peckish.

Honestly this is a lot of talking about what’s honestly a pretty simple concept. People also aren’t likely wasting calories, as they seem to fear, since the calorie store your character can have is pretty massive. Enough to last you more than a week at least.

[Erk]

Wasting calories will matter even less shortly because you’ll be able to hold more than 77k calories, you’ll just get chubby if you overdo it.

[Trigon]

I’m ready for that pudgy survivor body. True peak performance.

[darktoes]

Dad bod master race.

[Firebrand]

I like @TheZoneWizard’s idea. It eliminates confusion arising from wording, which is inevitable, given how language isn’t monolithic and how different people (including non-native speakers) learned it in different ways.

Evidently, the current system is not as clear as its protractors argue – otherwise, the heated discussion in this thread would never have happened. I only learned about how nutrition and stomach capacity interoperate and only figured out why one of my characters was malnourished despite seemingly eating well from @dpwb’s comments.

Non-linguistic descriptors seem to be the way to go, as far as relating the character’s sensations of hunger and thirst are concerned.

[tilia]

Personally, not a big fan of the bar system in UI designs like these. Keep an option around for text-based descriptors like the option we have for item damage.

And to “fix” the text-based descriptors, you could just drop the word “peckish” from the game completely and players will readily intuit that it means your stomach is not full nor are you starved. Done. That’s it. That’s all you need to do.

Funnily, a lack of feedback to the player here actually makes this less ambiguous all because there isn’t a good word for this sort of thing.

[dissociativity]

Satisfied could work, you’re full enough to be comfortable, but could fit in more.

[tilia]

Satisfied

You’d have the same problem though, I can already see the next thread reading: “Going from “Satisfied” to “Hungry” in 2 hours is stupid”

[TooDAMNMuch]

another true believer, can’t forget the CBM for even more stomach capacity, i personally sit at turgid and engorged when i’m done eating for three hours straight due to sillyness of design at current.

i mean, i only eat 30+ beef jerky per sitting, nothing unrealistic about that, right?
right?

[Cybervantyz]

Got through the whole discussion. Turned put pretty interesting one, both in relation to topic and discussion process itself.
I think that any feedback in (almost?) any form should be at least tolerated, as it can lead to all of us playing an overall better and more realistic game than before.
And this topic with the whole discussion underneath it makes a whole lot sense, actually. Numbers may work correctly, but it is not a right thing to tell a player that he is doing poor with feeding his (her?) character when he (she?) is not.
I’ve got confused with that “peckished” status as well. Removing that word and say nothing will be better than say that character is slightly annoying by not having his/her stomach full (if I understand that word correctly). It is correctly translated to “проголодавшийся” in Russian (which I prefer to use in the game and which is native to me), and in translated form it has the exactly same problem.
Colored bars are the worst possible solution. People will starve their characters to death and then feast as many as they can, then starve, then feast, and so on. Mechanically in will work of course - numbers under the hood are just numbers - it will keep characters up and running, but such a behavior is not what anyone tend to do in real life.
In addition to that, that bars (or explicit numbers) will damage the atmosphere. The game should (in my opinion) hide all of her numbers and formulas by any possible means, she should tell a player how a thing feels or what it is look like, but not throwing numbers in one’s face, as numbers are plentiful in literally any other game. Numbers lead to players calculating everything, not making decisions and not playing role.

[Stone]

Instead of displaying peckish, have something show up in the log “your stomach rumbles”, “you could use a snack”, “your stomach feels empty”. Maybe something along the lines of this could work.

[TheZoneWizard]

Bars are best. Have you seen how the garment bars work?

It should be noted that starvation would not be considered a good idea to attempt at exploiting, due to the negative side affects. Knowing that the character can only eat so much food at one time. Plus true starvation comes at the cost(should be in game if it isn’t) of making the character very weak. Unable to physically move at full speed. Unable to think clearly. Slowly dying of starvation is painful. Plus in real life when you are actually starving to near death your organs shut down. Eating and drinking become pointless when this process happens. The game could use other methods to bring some one back from this deathly ill point. Such as rare medicine in rare areas to ingest. Making the character black out for 12 hours to recuperate. Leaving the character with a permanent health point loss.

[cs1]

I spent a few days with CDDA last week after my usual 6-12 month breaks between sessions. I also found the new hunger system difficult to deal with.

When I saw “Peckish” I interpreted it as a mild form of hunger. No problem I’ve got plenty of food. Yet no matter how much I ate, 10k calories in a day, 20k, doesn’t matter, I kept getting “peckish”. What is going on here?

Going to the other extreme I cut off food intake entirely. Let’s wait to get hungry! I spent 2 full game days and did not get hunger notifications (this appears to be because of all the food I previously ate).

Unable to reason how to manage my calories I eventually read some of the source code.

Modeling stored calories and hunger as independent variables is a good goal. However, I don’t seem to have any way to estimate my stored calories other than the debug menu. IRL all I need to do is pull up my shirt. As suggested before let me know how fat I am to give me a gross sense of my stored calories. This would make the new system work fine for me, an improvement really. If I missed the non-debug way to see how fat I am it needs to be more prominent given I have to eat constantly.

As for “peckish” - do you really need that at all? Why not say nothing? As a player when the UI status changes it suggests I need to act.