RE: the solutions I’ve been kicking around.
The solution for the first issue? It doesn’t really have one, and doesn’t really need one other than players just being more aware of the timeframe. By playing on compressed time like that, they’re sacrificing some of the realism. Easy peasy. Maybe way down the line it’d be nice to add can rust with botulism or dry goods being infested with insects, but that’s kind of a marginal solution and doesn’t really add anything.
The solution for the second issue? I think it’d have to be multifaceted. I’d suggest adding a significant amount of time to harvesting, with a reduction based on skill (a skilled survivor knows what to look for), which would help reduce the ridiculous yields from a fresh face bumbling through the woods. Adding a few failure events like accidentally getting poison ivy or stung by something would also be neat more as a thematic thing to emphasize that you’re far more goofus than gallant. Another thing that I sort of love is the way that you don’t know if mushrooms are edible or not until you have enough survival. The current implementation is really game-y (dissimilar types don’t stack, recipes know which is which, etc), but the idea is a great one.
The solution for the third issue? This one’s a weird one, because I don’t think there really is one without drastically changing some elements of gameplay. The ‘simplest’ solution would be something like keeping track of the last 14 days of what you’ve eaten and apply a stacking morale penalty if you eat something too much, but that runs into all kinds of issues right out of the gate (like pizza providing a bunch of slices rather than a whole pizza causing quick stacking) and wouldn’t really be fun. It’s just another box to tick every morning. Nutritional deficiencies would be ~simulation~, but having to prevent catching scurvy would be outright un-fun.
I think the ideal thing to look at for this would be the actual sources of mountains of staple food and reduce those so people rely on a variety of foods. I can’t imagine giant insect musculature is enough to provide a significant amount of meat, or that the meat would be particularly usable like ‘regular’ meat. Acorn trees probably need to be adapted to the fruit tree system as well, in that they should only really be harvestable in Autumn (rip tanbark). Thematically, it’d also be kind of neat to shift most of the pre-cataclysm food from dry/canned goods to perishables - walking into a grocery store full of rot and scavenging the few canned goods is a lot more interesting than walking into a grocery store of edibles with an occasional rotten burrito or fruit juice in the fridges.
