New Eating Mechanic

[Hyena_Grin]

I find myself occasionally eating bread and then eating jam. I like to pretend I am spreading the jam on the bread, but let’s be honest here; chasing bread with jam just doesn’t taste as good as proper jammy bread. So we could probably adjust things a little;

Part 1: Instead of eating one food item at a time, when you use E to get to the eating menu, it would allow you to select multiple food items. The combined stats of all the items chosen will be shown, allowing you to ‘build a meal’ out of different items in your inventory.

Part 2: Food items are flagged. Meat, Grain, Fruit, Veggie, Sweet, and Soup (perhaps others if necessary). Other items, such as Mayonaise, Ketchup, Mustard, and the various seasonings and spices, along with being recipe ingredients (and themselves granting some amount of nutrition), are classified as Condiments. The idea here would be to match each condiment type to one or more food types. Salt for example could be good for Meats, Veggies, and Soups. Ketchup would be good for Meat and Veggies. Jam would be good for Grain and Sweets. Maple Syrup would be good for Grain, Fruit, and Sweets. Sugar would be good for Fruit and Sweets. Mayonaise would be for Grain and Veggie. Salad Dressing with Veggies. Etc etc.

Basically, when you combine a food item with a condiment that goes well with, you get a boost to enjoyment. For example:

x1 Cooked Meat : 50 Nutrition, 8 Fun
x1 Cooked Wild Veggies : 40 Nutrition, 0 Fun
x2 Salt : Condiment

Total: 50+40 Nutrition, 8(+4 from x1 Salt)+ 0(+4 from x1 Salt)=16 Fun —> Note that each ‘use’ of a condiment subtracts one from the pile.

It wouldn’t have to stop at condiments. Foods themselves could go well together. Like grains(bread, rolls, biscuits) and soups could garner an additional morale bonus. Fruit and Sweets is another. Meat and Veggies. Drinks could be included as well. Meat and beer. Sweets and wine.

This wouldn’t have to be a difficult process. It might on the surface look like a lot of management, but my thinking is that when you go into the Eat menu and select a food item, the game could highlight any items that would go well with it, whether that is a condiment or another food item. When a condiment is selected it would automatically use the number of portions that can be applied. So in the above example, when you start putting together your meal, you would select Cooked Meat. The game would then highlight Salt and Cooked Wild Vegetables. You select Salt and Cooked Wild Vegetables as the game suggests. Simply selecting the item would either take exactly 1 food item or exactly the number of condiment portions required for all food items in the meal. If a number is pressed first you can choose how many food items or condiment portions to use. So you could do 2x bread + 1 Strawberry Jam, make yourself a jam sandwich that would give you all the nutrition and enjoyment of all three items, plus a Fun bonus because jam goes with the bread.

Part 3: Utensils. The oft overlooked item. This is really simple; every food type has 0 to 2 utensils that make it easier and more enjoyable to eat. Meat wants a fork and knife. Veggies want a fork. Soup wants a spoon. Food can be eaten without these things, but it’s more enjoyable when you have eating utensils. So what’s the least intrusive way to manage this? If there are utensils in the area around the player or in their inventory, grant them a small morale bonus (+1, +2) to their meal. This could also apply to plates, bowls, and drinking glasses. Even sitting in a chair with a table in your proximity could give bonuses as well. The change should be very minor, but enough to make a difference.

The basic idea here is that if you combine all possible things; seasoned meat with a fork and knife to cut, buttered potatoes, bread and jam, a plate to hold it on, a glass of beer, a table to eat off and a chair to sit in instead of standing, then overall you will come away from that meal much happier than if you had simply stood in a gloomy kitchen eating unseasoned meat with your bare hands.

The way I envision this is having it be very unintrusive and as intuitive as possible. The game will do the heavy lifting, helping you decide what to combine and how many portions to use. In order to get other bonuses one would simply need to gather the needed objects in one place and consistently eat at the same location. Or bring their utensils/etcetera with them.

Although the backend work to flag everything in the game would be tough, in the end I think it would provide a system similar to recipes and capable of giving Fun bonuses (Only Cooking can give you nutrition bonuses), without actually needing every single thing (like a jam sandwich) needing to actually be a recipe in the game. It would be easier to work in new condiments/foods that can be combined with other foods/condiments without needing to clutter the crafting menu with more recipes.

Note: The idea of nearby items/furniture affecting the Fun of a task could be applied to other things as well. Reading in a comfortable chair, for example.
Note 2: This is a series of suggestions that I think would work in pieces or as a whole. The main suggestion, really, is flagging food items more specifically, and creating a ‘meal’ by combining food items. The rest is just more detail.

[EkarusRyndren]

I like the sound of it… Though if implemented it sounds like I’d need a table for my vehicle, an actual table, not just boxes by some seats. XD

Still, I like the sound of it. Not to mention, this’d make it possible to add time to eat things? Which would give the assorted mutations that speed/slow eating a chance to do their thing.

[vache]

Sounds like you’d have to do a mini-craft every time you eat. Sounds like it could get tedious if you want to eat a whole bag of chips, or something like that. Granted it all depends on implementation, but it’s an interesting sounding system.

[EkarusRyndren]

Sounds like you’d have to do a mini-craft every time you eat. Sounds like it could get tedious if you want to eat a whole bag of chips, or something like that. Granted it all depends on implementation, but it’s an interesting sounding system.

Well best guess the way it sounds if you wanted to eat a whole bag of chips it’d be something like the stat-screen at the start, press the left arrow and it decreases that item by 1, right and it increases by one. A way to speed it up might be to only include items you have on you or are nearby you? Possibly being able to tab to a list of stuff you can make?

[KA101]

I was thinking something along the lines of a skill-1 recipe to cut up the bread and spread the jam on it, making 4 servings of Jammy Bread.

(Hey, if you can carry around a portion of spaghetti bolognese in your pocket with no problems–you can, last I checked–you can carry around bread with jam on.)

[i2amroy]

Definitely sounds like an interesting and possibly nice idea, but IMO the reward/work ratio just isn’t high enough to go in anytime soon.

Just to implement the json itself you would need to first create a new json to include the various food groups, and then go through and add what group each individual food was in, and if they were a condiment you would then need to go through the json and define what groups they give bonuses too (or alternatively you would need to create several condiment groups, each on that provides bonuses to other specific groups).

Also I think we might end up with some trouble over individual tastes (I mean personally I love green onion sandwiches, and I have a friend who thinks peanut butter & cheddar sandwiches are awesome. How many other people have I met who think the same? Not many. :P).

All that said I definitely think there are some good points to the idea that should be considered.

[Hyena_Grin]

Sounds like you’d have to do a mini-craft every time you eat. Sounds like it could get tedious if you want to eat a whole bag of chips, or something like that. Granted it all depends on implementation, but it’s an interesting sounding system.

Eating a single item would be as easy as it was before, it’d just be an additional button press (enter). Except this system would allow you to increase the number of portions you eat without having to keep pressing E (chips) E (chips) E (chips) until you are done. You would instead press E, (number of portions), (chips), (enter) and you’d be done.

But just to drink one portion of water you would only have to press E, (water), Enter. Adding additional items to the ‘meal’ is entirely optional.

Not to mention, this’d make it possible to add time to eat things? Which would give the assorted mutations that speed/slow eating a chance to do their thing.

That’s a good idea, though I’m not sure how you would need to handle interruptions. If you are interrupted by a zombie while eating, how much of your food is left? Do you lose the combination bonuses? I guess the easiest way to handle it would be to not eat ANY of the food unless you are uninterrupted for the entire duration. If you are interrupted your food remains intact even if you are most of the way through a meal.

[quote=“KA101, post:5, topic:3636”]I was thinking something along the lines of a skill-1 recipe to cut up the bread and spread the jam on it, making 4 servings of Jammy Bread.

(Hey, if you can carry around a portion of spaghetti bolognese in your pocket with no problems–you can, last I checked–you can carry around bread with jam on.)

:-)[/quote]

I thought about going through and creating a bunch of bread + condiment recipes, but that seemed like a lot of effort, and any time someone added a new condiment or a new type of bread or something, you’d need to update the recipes to include that stuff. So I thought about a system that doesn’t need recipes, it just needs to be able to loosely identify what it is you’re eating and spit out some bonuses based on simple combinations.

[quote=“i2amroy, post:6, topic:3636”]Definitely sounds like an interesting and possibly nice idea, but IMO the reward/work ratio just isn’t high enough to go in anytime soon.

Just to implement the json itself you would need to first create a new json to include the various food groups, and then go through and add what group each individual food was in, and if they were a condiment you would then need to go through the json and define what groups they give bonuses too (or alternatively you would need to create several condiment groups, each on that provides bonuses to other specific groups).

Also I think we might end up with some trouble over individual tastes (I mean personally I love green onion sandwiches, and I have a friend who thinks peanut butter & cheddar sandwiches are awesome. How many other people have I met who think the same? Not many. :P).

All that said I definitely think there are some good points to the idea that should be considered.[/quote]

I agree, the workload is pretty high. But at least it could be done in pieces, if at all.

Re: individual tastes, that’s kind of the beauty of it. The system doesn’t get too specific, so if grain (bread) and vegetables (lettuce, tomato) give a bonus, and grain (bread) and meat (bacon), and mayo goes good with bread and vegetables, then you can put together a BLT sandwich that gets small bonuses here and there and adds up to a compelling meal. Without needing a recipe. And if you’d rather eat green onion sandwiches the game doesn’t distinguish between onions or lettuce or tomato. It’s just a vegetable. So it kinda works for a lot of individual tastes.

I actually like some weird combinations of things, but it doesn’t bother me if the game doesn’t reward them all. As long as it’s not overly specific, only discusses food groups rather than specific foods themselves, then it should be broad enough to please most people.

I think such a system (this or a variant) would be more worthwhile than it might seem at a glance. Right now, every time a new food item is added, it needs to be included in every recipe that might use it. Every time new recipes and foods are added the process of adding new stuff gets a little harder. Recipes are still important, but you could cut down on the need for so many recipes with a system that doesn’t need specific combinations to create specific items.

It’s sort of future-proofing. If all foods could be flagged and the jsons created to make it work, adding foods in the future would be a little easier. If someone wants to add hummus as a condiment, for example, they would only need to give the base values plus the two or three food types they think it would go well with. And it would automatically be part of the system, without the need for recipes.

[infectedmochi]

You have some awesome ideas. The work to create all different kind of food groups can be huge as others have already pointed out, I just want to add that this idea have the potential to expand to other thing, like having additional tools (hammer, wrench, screwdriver,…) speeds up and/or increase crafting success rate.

[Kazymir]

I am all over this idea.

[kevin.granade]

What we’d need for this to be reasonable to implement is a simple abstraction for compatibility.
Each food would need to have one or more tags, and we’d need a global set of rules for which tags go with which other tags.

For example an optional tag for comestables “Taste”, would have the values “sweet”, “sour”, “salty”, and “bitter”. And you could pair up complementary tastes. Unfortunately, there seems to be no indication about what makes things complementary in general, so that’s kind of a bust, but it’s just an example. All those labels seem to be good for is not pairing up “salty” with “salty”.

As for interrupted meals, we handle this by figuring out how much time a task will take, and applying all the effects at the very end (both consuming inputs and producing outputs), and if interrupted, you trigger the same task again and it asks you if you want to resume.

If you’re talking about just condiments, there’s a proposal to add “condiment” tags to foods, and you automatically (or with a popup list, if you have multiple) apply a condiment to any other meal you eat to enhance fun. It would also adjust the message to note you’re getting a benefit of the condiment.

[Senrain]

May I suggest a ‘Consume until satisfied’ key? Basically you continue to consume your liquid/food of choice and don’t stop until you’re full/slaked.

[kevin.granade]

There’s actually a PR pending that does that, just need to get a few things ironed out.

[Hyena_Grin]

[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:10, topic:3636”]What we’d need for this to be reasonable to implement is a simple abstraction for compatibility.
Each food would need to have one or more tags, and we’d need a global set of rules for which tags go with which other tags.

For example an optional tag for comestables “Taste”, would have the values “sweet”, “sour”, “salty”, and “bitter”. And you could pair up complementary tastes. Unfortunately, there seems to be no indication about what makes things complementary in general, so that’s kind of a bust, but it’s just an example. All those labels seem to be good for is not pairing up “salty” with “salty”.[/quote]

The idea was actually to give each food a ‘type,’ and then allow people adding condiments to decide what food ‘types’ the condiment goes with (possibly with a variant in how much Fun a condiment adds to different types). So it’s less about taste and more about convention. I specifically wanted to avoid getting into ‘salty’ and ‘sweet’ and ‘bitter’ because it’s getting into irrelevant specifics. Granted, avoiding this might result in some wacky combinations (who puts ketchup on corn?) but that’s fine. I figure that when you’re living in the apocalypse, you might appreciate things a bit more due to scarcity.

For example, if ‘boiled noodles’ is given food type ‘pasta’ then you could take the ‘jar of pesto’ and give it the following attributes (very loose example, I haven’t looked at food jsons);

Flag: Comestible, Condiment
CondFoodTypes: pasta:5,meat:1,vegetable:2

So if you put together a meal consisting of boiled noodles, canned salmon, and pesto, the pesto would give you +1 Fun for the salmon and +5 Fun for the noodles, because pesto goes better with pasta than meat, but if you use two portions it will give you both, for a total of +6 Fun on top of the Fun that the noodles and meat provide.

It’s really pretty simple. The difficulty (apart from coding) would be going through all of the foods, applying a food type, deciding which foods are condiments, and then adding in attributes for those condiments to decide which foods they go with (and how well).

[kevin.granade]

Well “pasta”, “meat”, “soup” are just a different set of tags, that would be perfectly fine. I’m a bit concerned about the numbers getting out of control though, if there are 5-10 tags, it’s perfectly reasonable to assign individual tags to condiments to indicate what they go with, but if there are 30+, it’s completely unreasonable for someone to have to evaluate how their new condiment interacts with 30+ different food categories just to add it. That’s what we call “tightly coupled”, and it gets problematic fast. What we need is categories that are fairly objective, so that both sides, the food tagging and the condiment tagging are simple and obvious. Does mustard go with pasta? why or why not? I have no idea, I’ve never tried it.
Does mayonaise go with bread? it’s really hard to say, some people don’t think mayonaise goes with anything, some people think it goes with everything. I used to know a guy that put katsup on absolutely every food he ate. I only use it for one or two specific things.

If you can come up with a good system for assigning the tags, we can look at it, but I don’t know of one, and without that the whole thing is a disaster waiting to happen.

[Hyena_Grin]

My inclination is to use as broad a group as possible where it still makes some sense. Such as ‘Meat.’ You could go into quite a bit more detail, but I avoided that for the same reason you’re describing. You could rapidly multiply each group by three and make it problematic to keep track of. I’ll just come up with a quick, imperfect example (NOT WHAT I AM SUGGESTING):

Meat

• Red
• White
• Seafood

Vegetable

• Greens
• Roots
• Culinary Fruits (tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers)

Fruit

• Berry
• Melon
• Fruit (generic)

Pasta

• Long Pasta (spaghetti)
• Short pasta (macaroni)
• Pastina (used for soups)

Grain

• Bread/Biscuits
• Crackers
• True Grains

Sweets

• Candy
• Baked Treat
• Confection (icecream, chocolate)

Soups

• Brothy
• Stew
• Cream/Chowder

Drinks

• Watery (water, sports drink)
• Fruit Drinks
• Soda

Alcohols

• Beer
• Hard Liquor
• Wine

So yes, obviously if you try to get too specific you end up with far too many tags to keep track of, and the more tags there are to keep track of, the more likely people will miss things or disagree with others.

I actually prefer to just stick with primary groups;

Meat
Vegetable(includes culinary vegetables like tomatoes)
Fruit
Grain (corn, rice, not including semi-edible ‘ingredients’ like flour)
Bread
Sweet (includes candy and baked treats)
Soup
Drink
Alcohol

Keeping things this broad solves a lot of problems. The less specific things are the more likely various things will be included. If I say that mayo goes well with veggies because it’s good on potatoes and dipping raw veggies in, that doesn’t mean I think it’s good on tomatoes. But because they are all classified as vegetables, it doesn’t matter. If you like mayo and onions then you’re good.

If you don’t think X and Y taste good together and are feeling particularly stubborn about it… don’t mix them together. Just because the game says ‘X and Y go together’ doesn’t mean you have to agree. There will always be situations where people think X and Y should go together but the game disagrees. My answer to this is that there is no accounting for taste, and it’s just a damn game. Get over it. If it bothers someone that much it’s not terribly difficult to edit the json to add/remove/adjust any stat you want.

Just because someone likes jam on their steak IRL doesn’t mean the game ought to sacrifice any semblance of fine-grain detail to satisfy every possible combination of food. At that point we may as well just dispense with food having different Fun stats at all.

I mean it’s not like the current system doesn’t already suffer from this issue. I can go through the food list right now and tell you that the Fun bonuses for many of them do not match my tastes remotely. I think the system I’ve outlined is broad enough to be as inclusive as possible, but you cannot be perfectly objective about these things, you can only try to find a balance between the abstract and the perfect model.

Anyway. My point is, we shouldn’t avoid a more detailed eating/food system with the excuse that it may not model people’s subjective tastes perfectly, because the current system is guilty of the same crime, and I’m not sure that subjectivity on that scale could ever be realistically achieved. So let’s meet in the middle somewhere.

[GlyphGryph]

Personally, I think this sounds absolutely miserable. I guess it appeals to some people here, but I honestly have no idea.

[kevin.granade]

[quote=“Hyena Grin, post:15, topic:3636”]My inclination is to use as broad a group as possible where it still makes some sense. Such as ‘Meat.’ You could go into quite a bit more detail, but I avoided that for the same reason you’re describing. You could rapidly multiply each group by three and make it problematic to keep track of. I’ll just come up with a quick, imperfect example (NOT WHAT I AM SUGGESTING):

So yes, obviously if you try to get too specific you end up with far too many tags to keep track of, and the more tags there are to keep track of, the more likely people will miss things or disagree with others.

I actually prefer to just stick with primary groups;

Meat
Vegetable(includes culinary vegetables like tomatoes)
Fruit
Grain (corn, rice, not including semi-edible ‘ingredients’ like flour)
Bread
Sweet (includes candy and baked treats)
Soup
Drink
Alcohol[/quote]
That’s not unreasonable, I got the impression that you were saying someone should apply an ad-hoc tag whenever they added a food, which would tend to move toward over-detailed over time.

[quote=“Hyena Grin, post:15, topic:3636”]Keeping things this broad solves a lot of problems. The less specific things are the more likely various things will be included. If I say that mayo goes well with veggies because it’s good on potatoes and dipping raw veggies in, that doesn’t mean I think it’s good on tomatoes. But because they are all classified as vegetables, it doesn’t matter. If you like mayo and onions then you’re good.

If you don’t think X and Y taste good together and are feeling particularly stubborn about it… don’t mix them together. Just because the game says ‘X and Y go together’ doesn’t mean you have to agree. There will always be situations where people think X and Y should go together but the game disagrees. My answer to this is that there is no accounting for taste, and it’s just a damn game. Get over it. If it bothers someone that much it’s not terribly difficult to edit the json to add/remove/adjust any stat you want.

Just because someone likes jam on their steak IRL doesn’t mean the game ought to sacrifice any semblance of fine-grain detail to satisfy every possible combination of food. At that point we may as well just dispense with food having different Fun stats at all.

I mean it’s not like the current system doesn’t already suffer from this issue. I can go through the food list right now and tell you that the Fun bonuses for many of them do not match my tastes remotely. I think the system I’ve outlined is broad enough to be as inclusive as possible, but you cannot be perfectly objective about these things, you can only try to find a balance between the abstract and the perfect model.

Anyway. My point is, we shouldn’t avoid a more detailed eating/food system with the excuse that it may not model people’s subjective tastes perfectly, because the current system is guilty of the same crime, and I’m not sure that subjectivity on that scale could ever be realistically achieved. So let’s meet in the middle somewhere.[/quote]
My problem isn’t that I’m concerned about someone disagreeing with the outcome, more likely there will steadily be requests for more and more specific combinations, and if we don’t reject them eventually every condiment matches every food <_<

My real problem is making everyone that adds a food categorize it, and making everyone that adds a condiment make a determination of which food categories it matches with, even though the categories are fairly arbitrary, all for the questionable benefit of saying that certain condiments don’t go with certain foods.

Does mayonaise go with meat? vegetables? fruit? grain? bread? It seems to me the answer is going to almost always be “sometimes”, at least depending on who you ask.

This isn’t an alternative to not using condiments at all, this is an alternative to just letting every condiment match every food, and if someone doesn’t like a combination, they can skip it, as you said. Categorizing all the food is problematic, and there doesn’t seem to be much benefit compared to letting the player decide what goes with what.

The larger “make a meal” concept is really intriguing, but I have absolutley no idea how to make such a thing work in practice.

[GlyphGryph]

Pretty sure mayonaise goes with everything except yogurt. Its even delicious on pizza.

[system]

mayo
goes with everything
There’s two things you should never ever startle: bear and sober russian.
You did that to the second specimen.
HOW THE HELL MAYO GOESWITH EVERYTHING? If you put in as a sauce to something fat - you’ll womit out your own liver(if you managed to swallow that at the first place)
However, ketchup+mayo does really goes with everything. Except for ketchup and mayo - because it’s ingredients.

[Hyena_Grin]

Personally, I think this sounds absolutely miserable. I guess it appeals to some people here, but I honestly have no idea.

Do you mind elaborating a little? I’m wondering if I haven’t explained myself well, because the end result would look very similar to how the game works right now, only with the option to do a little bit more. It’s a nickel and dime effect and it’s very unobtrusive, but could have a big combined impact.

‘Absolutely miserable’ is a bit harsh, given the above.

That’s not unreasonable, I got the impression that you were saying someone should apply an ad-hoc tag whenever they added a food, which would tend to move toward over-detailed over time.

Due to the nature of open-source projects it’d require some management. If someone can make a good case for a new tag, it might be worth adding, but for the most part most things would fall quite nicely under the groups I listed.

My problem isn't that I'm concerned about someone disagreeing with the outcome, more likely there will steadily be requests for more and more specific combinations, and if we don't reject them eventually every condiment matches every food <_<

My real problem is making everyone that adds a food categorize it, and making everyone that adds a condiment make a determination of which food categories it matches with, even though the categories are fairly arbitrary, all for the questionable benefit of saying that certain condiments don’t go with certain foods.

Sure, and that makes sense. If you just throw in new tags people may ignore them. But if the system were successful people would hopefully be motivated to maintain their work and keep it up to standard, whatever that standard is. If they don’t, then their food items are going to not be included in the system. They could still be eaten but wouldn’t get a bonus from condiments or whatever.

I dunno if I’d call it questionable, though.

We’re already saying that you need specific things for recipes. Who is to say that X isn’t a perfectly good substitute for Y in a recipe? Yeah recipes give some alternatives but they are almost universally all ‘accepted’ substitutes. You can’t substitute coffee syrup for maple syrup to make pancakes, for example. That’s arbitrary as well. Hell I regularly eat pancakes with jam instead of syrup (I love jam), but that’s not an option. Recipes are both more restrictive and more frequently far more arbitrary than what I am suggesting. But if we did away with recipes I think the game would lose something, not gain freedom to make pancakes however you want.

The purpose of ‘systems’ is not to emulate reality but to build a structure around which to direct gameplay. It doesn’t need to fit every situation, it just needs to be internally consistent. Condiments should serve different purposes for the same reasons that every tool isn’t a hammer. Even though you can hammer a nail with a wrench. Why do we make the distinction? Because every tool that can do the same job devalues the original. It is less interesting to find a hammer if you already have 8 tools that can hammer just fine. It is less interesting to find mayonaise if it is just jam and sugar and salt and hummus - all just the same thing with a different name.

Let’s say we go with the ‘condiments apply to everything the same way’ route. Are we going to say that all condiments affect all foods equally? Do they all give +2 Fun? Is that really very interesting? Or do some condiments give more Fun? Do some give less? Who decides what condiments are superior? Is mayo the best condiment? Sugar? Salt? Ketchup?

I dunno. To me that does not sound like a better option than saying spaghetti sauce doesn’t go on fruit, but it goes great on pasta and might improve meat.

Anyway, I think I’m fighting an uphill battle here. The ‘eat a meal’ mechanic might be a nice feature on its own, anyway. And I’m still fond of the idea of nearby objects and furniture improving the Fun value of tasks.