Revamp to Hunger

Most of the time you want either fun or nutrition. Morale from food is too short-term to matter except for stacking it for elated status to install CBMs.
And if you’re already crafting stuff this complex, this means you’ve got a good stash or even a mobile base. In this case, biscuits are much cheaper than lasagne - 2 flour and 1 oil for 8*28 nutrition (and some small fun boost that doesn’t matter).

Food health values don’t matter even in the slightest once you get vitamins. Each vitamin has the equivalent of healthy 50 (it’s just hidden under a function rather than directly in the json).

Good craftable foodstuffs could use a giant nutrition nerf. Morale boost from food could use a giant timeout boost. Plus maybe some morale scaling, to discourage stacking food fun for intelligence bonuses.

I do not have any polite, or, in fact, non-slur words for suggesting to blindly nerf something that alleviates an extremely annoying mechanic, which includes such gems as “you can either make meals on the spot or make non-spoiling food, because storing spoiling food is futile - it decays much faster than character gets hunger”. IRL mac and cheese, while rather unappetizing, would be perfectly edible after 8 hours of unrefrigerated nighttime sleep - CDDA, nope, rots.
If you do try flat-out nerfing it, at very least consider that 1: cooked food should have some benefit over consuming its (edible) components raw, along with roughly equal or higher nutrition, and 2: lower the total amounts and number of portions, not individual nutrition of portions.

And if there’s a requirement to “discourage” something, something that prompts the ‘discouraged’ behavior should be re-inspected and fixed instead.

Some foods DO need adjustments, though. Like lasagne magically having 150% of the nutrition of spaghetti bolognese despite being produced from identical ingredients. Or that adding a bit of sugar and a waffle iron magically multiplies the nutrition by about the same number (pancakes vs. waffles).

Gee, I wonder how fast would complaints about them being overkillingly imbalanced drop if the healthiness was stated explicitly instead of being obscured via jsons and functions.
Is the Leukocyte Breeder CBM the same way?

[quote=“Barhandar, post:22, topic:8902”]I do not have any polite, or, in fact, non-slur words for suggesting to blindly nerf something that alleviates an extremely annoying mechanic, which includes such gems as “you can either make meals on the spot or make non-spoiling food, because storing spoiling food is futile - it decays much faster than character gets hunger”.

Is the Leukocyte Breeder CBM the same way?[/quote]

No need to “blindly” nerf anything. Just get it in line with everything else. You know, like in “having choices instead of just always having the objectively best option”.
Prepared, spoiling food should have some advantages, but not ones that wreck the entire nutrition system by just being so good.
And having food spoil way too quickly isn’t enough of an argument for having insta-satiating recipes that cost acorns, water and common cooking oil.

Yes, leukocyte breeder is similar, but actually far more powerful because it also affects health value directly, rather than health mod.
Vitamins are enough to offset a heroin binge, leukocyte breeder is enough to offset constantly being on heroin and crack for the entire past year (though you’d have to activate the breeder up to 150 times).

Bionic immune system’s POINT is to be able to counteract unhealthy crap if you can keep activating it.

Food audits can happen, sure.

[quote=“Barhandar, post:18, topic:8902”][quote=“Packbat, post:16, topic:8902”]…actually, I think I’d remix these into a 5-meter system.

[ol][li]Satiation - how physically full your stomach is. Both food and drink increase this.[/li]
[li]Nutrition - a mostly hidden stat that simply adds up the values for any food and drink that hasn’t been digested yet. Represented by an indicator on Hunger of whether it is growing or dropping.[/li][/ol][/quote]
Which is how, roughly, hunger and thirst currently work: there’s numbers for what your character already has (=digested), numbers for what is in their stomach (and can be emptied forcefully), and they’re added up with result shown to player.[/quote]
Huh. I assumed that the current system was something else because you get full much faster when you are well-fed than when you are starved. I think the same amount of food should fill your belly however starved you are.

(Or, possibly, starvation should make your stomach shrink, but that’s a little bit sadistic even for C:DDA.)

[quote=“Packbat, post:25, topic:8902”][quote=“Barhandar, post:18, topic:8902”][quote=“Packbat, post:16, topic:8902”]…actually, I think I’d remix these into a 5-meter system.

[ol][li]Satiation - how physically full your stomach is. Both food and drink increase this.[/li]
[li]Nutrition - a mostly hidden stat that simply adds up the values for any food and drink that hasn’t been digested yet. Represented by an indicator on Hunger of whether it is growing or dropping.[/li][/ol][/quote]
Which is how, roughly, hunger and thirst currently work: there’s numbers for what your character already has (=digested), numbers for what is in their stomach (and can be emptied forcefully), and they’re added up with result shown to player.[/quote]
Huh. I assumed that the current system was something else because you get full much faster when you are well-fed than when you are starved. I think the same amount of food should fill your belly however starved you are.

(Or, possibly, starvation should make your stomach shrink, but that’s a little bit sadistic even for C:DDA.)[/quote]

Because there’s a hell of a lot less room from no-message to Full than there is from Starving! to Full. Old system is old.

Honestly, the old system is fine. Perhaps a fullness counter could be added so that if you’re starving, you can’t get to full in one sitting, but otherwise micromanaging food it just annoying.

Before we implement health benefits and risks, we need to consider that health has too small of an effect to even matter. You’ll still catch the flu with high health (filter masks are the only thing that saves you from the constant annoyance) and hp regen via sleeping doesn’t really matter after the first 3 days either.

Also, my characters never care for vitamins or leukocyte breeder. Such a bother to remember using them regularly. I use vaccines immediately if I find them, and that’s the extent of how much I can be arsed with my character’s health micromanagement.

Maybe it’s off-topic but you catch colds and influenza by having contact with people who have that and people are pretty scarce in Cata, if present at all. You don’t get them from eating potato chips and fried food every day.

Unhealthy eating habits don’t really matter considering the typical lifespan of a survivor. So diabetes or atherosclerosis is out of the question. Rabbit starvation and scurvy seem more like it.

I don’t think any revision of the needs system should be that convoluted or in depth or over-the-top, cataclysm isn’t really an long-term survival/colony/settler game. a few added mechanics, fullness vs nutrition is ok, flus and colds should not even be in the game and the health metric should reflect some in some other way.