Has the stomach system been updated? what does peckish mean?

Game Talk The Bunker
1

hello i just updated after 6 days and among the new changes, the HUD seems to also display peckish or whatever now in the hunger section. now I was hungry, i ate 1 L of woods soup 2 hours later i got PECKISH, drank some water and boom hungry again i was like hmmm so i went in house ate 6 pieces of sausage that’s about 1.50 L of food and >2000 kcal and 1 hour later after building a wood wall i got this PECKISH again and also thirsty, drank my water and im hungry again.

now what exactly is going on with all those? are those bugs? this is all very confusing

2

peckish means that your stomach is basically empty, that does not mean that you feel hungry.
the hunger notification you get from eating is a bug actually, it shouldnt appear when you were eating.

3

i get it when drinking water if peckish.

4

it is still the same bug, that you get the hungry notification for that
you can read about it here too, its in PR to fix it https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/29938

5

yes but no hunger effects for stats or speed. hmmm its really annoying to have that appear so often.

im not sure how to fix that, to i need to put it in my game or something? i use the CDDA Launcher usually for whatever new experimentals come out

6

just wait until the pr has been merged into the maingame, then you can use the launcher to update it

7

ok this is really bugged now i cant suffer from hunger. just drink water and other than having the hungry status show, then disappear every now and then, without me actually eating. my character seems to survive without eating for days without any hunger penalty

8

“3 minutes without air, 3 days without water, 3 weeks without food” is the old rule of thumb for how long you can survive.

Your survivor can go for days without eating food, but he’s slowly starving when you do that. He’s not going to die immediately, but consuming nothing but water will eventually kill him.

3 Likes
9

yes i know i’ve playing for a while haha. but normally you would get reminded to eat by the debuffs and the hungry message. so after testing yes, i did eventually get famished.however,

it took at least three days! and i jumped straight from peckish to famished. again, after drinking water or consuming anything the peckish status seems to jump to the correct one. this is definetely bugged. much hassle with this new stomach system tbh…

10

The slightly non-intuitive part is that you have a single indicator that is reflecting TWO states:

  1. Fullness
  2. Need for calories

TL;DR - if the panel doesn’t say ‘Very Hungry’, ‘Famished’, or ‘Starving’, you can functionally ignore it. You don’t need food currently.

For those more inclined towards details:

If you are full (of cookies, cabbage, water, booze, tainted meat, sand, whatevs…), then you list as ‘Full’ or possibly ‘Bloated’ or something along those lines. Doesn’t matter if you are calorically starving.

If you are NOT full, then the panel may display values like ‘peckish’ or ‘hungry’, meaning that you have plenty of room in your tummy, but you don’t really need more calories, so you don’t really need to eat. However, if it displays ‘Very Hungry’ or ‘Famished’ or ‘Starving’ then you DO need calories, and certainly should eat when you get the chance.

That’s it in a nutshell. If you want more detail you can pop open your character panel and there’s a section that shows your current body fitness, which will be something like ‘Normal’ or ‘Overweight’, or presumably values like Obese or Skinny, or Anorexic or whatever. These indicate your overall caloric status, completely separate from how your tummy is feeling. So if you are currently ‘overweight’ but ‘hungry’, then really you don’t need to eat for a while and can just ignore it.

Honestly the one thing I would change right now in the system is to have the ‘hungry’ text changed from yellow to grey, and only have it go to yellow at ‘Very Hungry’. That would make the feedback quite a bit more intuitive for most people, I think. In CDDA, Yellow means ‘you may want to do something about this’, and red means ‘do something about it NOW’, while grey means ‘nominal’ - and the Hungry status in the game right now is a nominal status, not a warning.

5 Likes
11

colour coding peckish to be yellow if there’s actually any demand for calories, and green if it doesn’t actually /need/ to be addressed would probably help keeps things clear

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12

“Your stomach feels so empty…”

Does this mean literally no food in stomach, or starving, or parasite?

13

It’s a warning sign that means you’re down to like 80% of your healthy body mass. Eat more calories, or the warnings will get worse and you’ll start to starve.
At 50% you’ll get “You feel like you haven’t eaten in days” and at 25% you are starving.

2 Likes
14

I like the new system so far. Feels like reptilian metabolism.

15

In other words, just because you want to eat doesn’t mean you should?

It’s actually kind of funny how the system seems to get really weird when it tries to model accurate health conditions. In the real world, it’s very possible to stuff your face with low-quality food and still suffer a lot of the same malnutrition effects as someone who isn’t eating at all.

3 Likes
16

Exactly this,
Turns out when we model a system based on real-world numbers and real-world feedback as much as we can, people eat too much.

Which is… more realistic than we intended lol, thats exactly why theres an obesity epidemic irl, people eat when they feel a bit peckish, but dont eat the amount that corresponds to what they actually need.

To avoid this in cataclysm:DDA, as other people have said, just only eat little snacks when peckish, or nothing at all, and only pay attention when the status stays hungry for a while, or turns to “very hungry”, as far as I recall, “very hungry” only appears when your stomach is empty AND you need calories too, thats the time to really eat.
Its perfectly natural for a human being to be hungry for a good while before every meal.

3 Likes
17

Exactly as dpwb says. I do find peckish useful since I know when I can start eating low calorie, low volume, but vitamin rich foods instead of stuffing my face full of pie.

I like starting with XS lately and trying to build myself back to a healthy weight.

18

I honestly find this whole discussion to be one of the most fascinating little windows on design psychology and how it interacts with expectations as a system becomes perhaps a bit more realistic than we’re comfortable with, even in the real world. :smiley:

The idea that we’ve modeled a system in a game such that it creates some similar psychological traps and problems that we actually see people suffer in the real world (ie, hunger doesn’t really reflect your need for calories in an accurate manner and can trick you into gaining weight when easy calories are too readily available) is really quite interesting.

4 Likes
19

you’ll have plenty of data now to work with now that people are living in a miniclysm with going out for food being risky with the virus
personally it was always seemed foolish how the average americans gorge themselves whenever they feel slightly hungry, but then again i’m a special case since I have the fortune of not being born in america and I only eat to keep myself alive and , not for pleasure. It takes several hours for me to actually even get hungry.
in my opinion “realistic” things are only uncomfortable to some people because they’ve forgotten what life is like due to being so spoiled by how easy modern life is. its like a person hating exercise cause it hurts since they’ve atrophied.
come to think of it that may make an interesting trait. you’d suffer extra moral penalties and have low fitness due to a luxurious lifestyle, but start with extra money

21

Forgot to update ignore for now