Nutrition System

[CosmicKobal]

I’m thinking that there should be an actual nutrition system involved.

YES, you can currently live on nothing but meat, or acorns, or eggs if you have enough of them, but if there were an actual nutrition system, then there would be a NEED to prepare and eat pine needle tea for the Vit C. Or to make sure you got enough salt, or potassium, or electrolytes, etc. you might have ALL the fish in the world, but you lack VIT C or whatever.

you would NEED to get enough calories to prevent morale modifiers and traits like Obese, Fat, Overweight, Thin, Gaunt, Twiggy, etc. each progressive trait would come with appropriate stat modifiers. This would be separate from the Hungry/Starving/Bloated/Sated that you can get now. it’s possible after all to be twiggy and bloated, or obese and starving.

Farming would become much more of a requirement and less of a ‘oh look, im growi- no, wait… the zombie destroyed it…’.

you would NEED to protect your crops

This addition of reality would help make the game more realistic, which would make it more challenging without having to add more enemies or muck about with the combat system while adding more depth.

Thoughts?

[Wally-kun]

I’m pretty sure it could be worked out with a little code and a couple disease additions. It’d definitely add some spice to things but would also make life for people with meat intolerance or allergies to whatever all the more challenging. So suddenly you can’t just not eat something, you need to find alternatives or you’re going to get some health problems over the long run.

And it would have to be over the long run. You don’t just get scurvy because you haven’t eaten fruits for a couple weeks.

[Pthalocy]

It’d have to be simple enough to not drive people way, or have the majority of its cleverness buried in hidden stats like the current health stat. Something where we have a good idea where it’s going, but don’t have to micromanage shitty little number values would be perfect.

Counting calories, protein, vitamins, and getting enough vegetables is already an over-difficult and frustrating experience irl, and this is as someone with access to good food AND food information. And no apocalypse. More diet related conditions (scurvy! yarr) might be alright though.

[CosmicKobal]

I guess keeping it simple WOULD be for the best. The base game as it exists now is already too much for many new players, what with the learning curve…

I suppose just having diet related conditions like Scurvy and hidden effects like slowed healing, lower max health, lower max stamina(once we HAVE stamina) would be alright…

[vache]

I think the effect system would be a good way to do it, but it would have to be greatly simplified. The big problem would be keeping track of the nutrition values of every food. Lets say there were 5 things we wanted to track for health/nutrition: lipids, proteins, carbohydrates, vitamin c, and potassium. Each food would have to have some value for each of these factors, and the player would have to keep track of their current rating for each. Then there has to be some sort of reasonable decay rate for each of those values, some effect added when the value becomes too high and too low, and some way to make the player aware of what’s happening in each situation in a way that they can reasonably understand how to handle it. Remember when tetanus was added? What was previously a “you cut your torso on the debris” and 1 hp of torso damage is now a good chance to send you into horrible spasms with very little information about why or what to do about it.

So, there is a large amount of work to be done with a system like this:

1. Determine what nutrients to track
2. Determine effects of each nutrient
3. Determine how much of each nutrient each food provides (a TON of work here)
4. Convey the nutrient values of each food to the player (easy for packaged food items, but what about cooked meat?)
5. Track/save/load player nutrient values
6. Inform the player in a realistic manner of their current nutrition values and how to fix any problems from it

After that is done, the big upkeep is to make sure all new added food have each of their nutrition values set. If any new nutrient is added, each food item will need to be updated to include it. It sounds like a lot of work, with not a lot of benefit at this point, but if done well it could be a worthwhile addition.

[troll_from_behind]

Maybe tweaking the Health-system with threshold, that add effects of gameplay value with text telling things like “You feel strong” or “You’re getting a bit pale”.
So instead of havin a new thing added you just tweaked the current one maybe giving negative points from too onesided meals?

[Bumpkin]

[quote=“vache, post:5, topic:9686”]I think the effect system would be a good way to do it, but it would have to be greatly simplified. The big problem would be keeping track of the nutrition values of every food. Lets say there were 5 things we wanted to track for health/nutrition: lipids, proteins, carbohydrates, vitamin c, and potassium. Each food would have to have some value for each of these factors, and the player would have to keep track of their current rating for each. Then there has to be some sort of reasonable decay rate for each of those values, some effect added when the value becomes too high and too low, and some way to make the player aware of what’s happening in each situation in a way that they can reasonably understand how to handle it. Remember when tetanus was added? What was previously a “you cut your torso on the debris” and 1 hp of torso damage is now a good chance to send you into horrible spasms with very little information about why or what to do about it.

So, there is a large amount of work to be done with a system like this:

1. Determine what nutrients to track
2. Determine effects of each nutrient
3. Determine how much of each nutrient each food provides (a TON of work here)
4. Convey the nutrient values of each food to the player (easy for packaged food items, but what about cooked meat?)
5. Track/save/load player nutrient values
6. Inform the player in a realistic manner of their current nutrition values and how to fix any problems from it

After that is done, the big upkeep is to make sure all new added food have each of their nutrition values set. If any new nutrient is added, each food item will need to be updated to include it. It sounds like a lot of work, with not a lot of benefit at this point, but if done well it could be a worthwhile addition.[/quote]

I’d vote for keeping it far simpler. Fat (animal fat, most junk foods, some beans) and vitamins (fruits, veg, vitamin pills), with no quantity tracking except a simple -1 for each full day you go without and +1 for each day you consume some form of it. Maybe +2 if your day includes vitamin pills. Hit -5 fat and you start to get rabbit starvation, -5 vitamins and you start to get vitamin deficiencies, which evolve into worse debuffs the longer you go. Cap the stored fat/vitamin levels around +5. It’d keep people off the cooked-meat-only diet without bringing in tedious potassium-level tracking.

[Pthalocy]

We could take an incredibly hack-y route and look to the food’s already-included type categories for some benefits. Junk food, meats, veggies, …wheat? I think? And start out with a really coarse system. We’re familiar with junk tagged food dropping our health stat. Could just broadly make meat count for fat/protein and veggies count against scurvy, say. I forget how extensive dairy is used as a tag, but having it add +1 to protein score and +2 to fats or something might actually make it more useful in spite of it’s spoilage issues.

It’d be a bit stupid in some places (an all-potato diet should not prevent scurvy for instance, even if it is a ‘veggie’), but it would still roughly promote a diet of something besides potatoes.

You’d have to keep the new food-group health stats quite coarse I think, compared to the health stat itself. Scale of 1-10 max, or tiny values like Bumpkin proposes. You’d just need to eat different stuff once in a while to make sure none of them empty. It’d be not unlike managing drink versus food , in my mind’s ideal: You might get full before all stats are recovered, so mix up your diet to keep them all pretty decent.

[kevin.granade]

An idea I’ve been kicking around on IRC is having a small number of nutrition effects that food can apply, general categories like what Pthalocy mentioned. Eating a food with a given property applies the effect for some amount of time, additional food with the same property would just reset the duration for the most part. Effects would have small good or bad effects that would only be noticeable in aggregate when they stack with each other. A nice effect of this is it only gets applied to particularly good or bad foods, so minimises the ongoing work.

[CosmicKobal]

[quote=“troll from behind, post:6, topic:9686”]Maybe tweaking the Health-system with threshold, that add effects of gameplay value with text telling things like “You feel strong” or “You’re getting a bit pale”.
So instead of havin a new thing added you just tweaked the current one maybe giving negative points from too onesided meals?[/quote]

Kinda liking the idea of tracking too many or too few of certain types of foods rather than tracking the individual nutrients. The nutrition system could be as simple as just making sure that you eat a variety of foods. I don’t remember if this is already a thing or not, but some cooking recipes could count as multiple categories as far as the nutrient tracking goes. this might help with my other thread ‘Chemistry as a skill’. High level cooking recipes could include balanced survival meals that would ensure the proper amounts of nutrients per meal. possibly the best way to work the balanced survival food would be to have the nutrition trackers simply default to a ‘healthy’ amount. If you continue to eat the balanced survival foods day after day, then you would have a consistent use for high level cooking, and also stay nutritionally healthy.

We could even use the existing ‘nutrition’ values that foods already have.

of course, you don’t HAVE to make and eat the high cooking skill level balanced meals, but I imagine it would be the simplest way to manage your nutrition in late game. the balanced survival food/ nutrient paste/etc, wouldn’t have a positive mood modiefier, and it might even have a negative modifier, but thats becuase it’s a SURVIVAL food. you could instead farm/hunt for ingredients, keep them stored in a powered fridge, and actually cook healthy meal that you would seriously enjoy for a long time. I would imagine that the Gourmand( or whatever it’s called) trait would extend any positive long term mood modifiers even longer, and possibly negate any negative modifiers from eating the Balanced survival food?

… perhaps some kind of nutrient pump CBM or equipable gear? you keep it filled with nutrient paste that you make with high level cooking, and it will automatically keep you in tip top shape nutrient-wise

[Pthalocy]

The upside to calling on currently-in-use food ‘material’ tags is that it removes a LOT of groundwork that would need to be laid down in order to make any nutrition system function.
Food items with multiple food types (a cheese sandwich is both dairy and wheat, for instance) would give bonuses/whatevers for both those food group types. This might actually encourage players to make mixed recipes, rather than just eat some plain bread and then shove a whole cheese wedge in their mouth.
As it stands, I often won’t bother with complex recipes in favour of getting myself fed and using cooking resources for preservation and parasite-prevention only. I find enough ipods and books to support my morale that getting it from fancy meals is a waste of effort. Nutritional needs would make the sheer volume of recipes more worth trying out for reasons besides funsies.

Hey CosmicKobal! I really like the idea of late-game survivor meals being balanced in ways besides being FILLING. Smart idea!
I’m not sure if having a deep love for food and a bottomless stomach would make healthyness of food last longer… however, Gourmand means you can’t vomit from over-eating. If you’re lacking for multiple food groups, you can just shove a ton of food in to get your nutritional requirements back up. Sure, you’d be eating when not hungry, but if it cures your rabbit fever you’d do it. I don’t think the Gourmand trait would need modifying in the face of this nutritional overhaul.