Track nutrition separately from hunger

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

As the title says. Healthy people will eat when they’re hungry, but there are many things in this game that can impact your hunger. Drugs, moods, illness, disgusting environments, etc.

As I’ve talked about in other threads, drugs like heroin or cocaine can decrease your hunger, making it less likely you will eat when you need to. A heroin addict can easily suffer from malnutrition even though they rarely (if ever) experience real hunger. In fact, this is both a danger and subversive boon where it comes to many drugs. If you do certain drugs, you will not get hungry as often, and may never feel hunger while under its influence. This might appeal to those seeking a solution to their mood problems. But it eventually will lead to malnutrition.

Of course other drugs may actually stimulate hunger. Marijuana is the classic culprit, making people eat and eat. Someone high on weed may not be able to get rid of their Hunger pangs at all, even after they’ve gotten an ‘Overate’ modifier to their stats, reducing their speed and dexterity.

Depression may lead to increased OR decreased hunger. Though it shouldn’t vary wildly - this kind of thing tends to be unique from person to person. If you are prone to overeating when depressed, it is likely you will always overeat when depressed.

Appetite suppression/stimulation could be their own modifiers that inform the player the character is currently not experiencing hunger in a normal way. Suppressed appetite might mean getting Full faster and not enjoying food as much. Appetite stimulation might mean getting hungry faster and having a harder time reaching a ‘Full’ state, as well as enjoying food more.

In other words, smoking weed and eating chips would be a great way to improve your mood - just like in real life. =P

Nutrition as a tracked stat shouldn’t vary from person to person. Your body is either getting enough nutrition or it isn’t. Or it’s getting too much. The body may require more nutrition when it is injured and trying to repair itself, and may require less when there has been little physical exertion or a great deal of sleep.

Malnutrition and Severe Malnutrition are persistent modifiers that would reduce your stats, resistances, and healing times. Actual, life-threatening starvation would be determined by this state, rather necessarily by your hunger state. The player should of course be alerted when they are starving to death - appetite suppression or not, it is something the player should know. So it is possible for the character’s hunger status to go from Fine to Starving! immediately if the nutrition level drops low enough.

2

If I’m reading you right, what you’re suggesting is that there should be a distinction between “subjective” hunger (i.e. how hungry I feel) and “objective” hunger (i.e. how much my body needs to consume). A character’s subjective hunger could very well be affected by everything you’ve mentioned, all without affecting objective hunger.

I’m just wondering exactly how you would suggest to implement adding subjective hunger. Would it completely replace the objective tracking that already exists, leaving characters with an unreliable measure of their degree of starvation?

If so, we have to think about the repercussions of adding this to the game. Characters who use heroin would be at a heighetened risk of starvation, because they might never even see the warning signs that they need to eat. A character who lives/spends too long in the sewers might be too nauseated by his environment to develop an appetite, maybe not realizing this before it’s too late to do anything about it.

I think that, while having this implemented might be cool from a realism point of view, it could definitely lead to some seriously confusing deaths and needless confusion regarding when a character should eat.

A much easier way of adding “the munchies” to the game would be to just add as a side-effect to marijuana and maybe even alcohol a “munchies” morale penalty, that would only be sated through the immediate consumption of (enjoyable) food. Conversely, drugs like heroin and cocaine as well as depression might reduce by a certain percentage the morale bonus of food enjoyability. With this method, you get the same results without overly confusing the player.

3

Subjective hunger wouldn’t be entirely divorced from the body’s need for nutrients. How hungry your character feels would simply be modified by effects caused by drugs/illness/mood/environments.

I actually don’t know exactly how hunger is handled in the game right now, but if you’ll allow me to demonstrate one example;

Hunger is pretty specifically related to how much you have eaten lately. Nutrition is a longer-term statistic. You can eat plenty and still be malnourished. In fact many overweight people are malnourished because their diet doesn’t include important vitamins, but that’s beyond the scope of this.

Nutrition level would go from a ceiling (healthy) to a bottom (death). Somewhere between those two points would be ‘Malnutrition’ where negative modifiers kick in. And beneath that ‘Severe Malnutrition’ and beneath that ‘Starving to Death’ with increasing negative modifiers.

Your nutrition level would be adjusted by your hunger rating. Hunger in this abstract is really an indication of how much food you’ve already got in your system. Imagine hunger going from -100 to +100. You would become peckish at about +10 and hungry at -1 to -20. Very hungry at -21 to -40. And so on. Or some such variation on that. ‘Overeating’ would be at about 80, at which point your character would stop eating.

As long as your hunger level is in the negatives, you gradually lose nutrition and eek toward malnutrition. As long as your hunger level is in the positives you gradually gain nutrition. Obviously your hunger naturally ticks down toward -100, so having a lot of food in your belly means more time gaining nutrition before you start losing it.

What the hunger modifiers would do is adjust where on the Hunger scale you start getting messages. The scale itself wouldn’t change. It is still -100 to +100. It’s just that your body would be slow to notify you when you are hungry. Or notify you prematurely. So if you are doing a drug that is suppressing your appetite by -10, instead of getting peckish at +10, you might get peckish at 0. Meaning you’re already close to the point of losing nutrition rather than gaining it when you first realize you need food. Likewise, instead of getting full at 60 you would get full at 50. And they would flat out refuse to eat more food at 70 instead of 80.

So while there would be a risk that if you had a -20 hunger modifier due to heroin, the flu, and/or depression, that people may only eat enough to get rid of their peckish modifier, and still be in the negatives for nutrition overall. Ie, their body is still burning more nutrients than it is getting. This however is a very real danger associated with drugs and sickness.

There are three safety mechanisms in place here:

First is that hunger modifiers are temporary and it takes a while to starve to death. Frankly if you are on heroin so much that your appetite remains low for long enough to kill yourself, you probably deserved it. I don’t anticipate too many scenarios where it would be easy to go long periods without experiencing an unmodified hunger state.

Second is that the character menu will let you know when you are suffering from Malnutrition. If you are satisfying your hunger but still have a malnutrition problem then it is up to the player to modify their eating to compensate. It’s not that hard, just eat more. There’s nothing stopping you from eating an extra cooked meat. Simply eating until you’re Full once in a while would make a big difference. As well, when the character reaches a malnutrition state it could appear in the text log that ‘You feel weak from malnutrition.’

Third is that if the player begins to starve to death (via dangerously low nutrition) it will alert the player through the normal hunger mechanism. ‘STARVING TO DEATH!’ might appear quite suddenly despite recently eating a (small) meal to get rid of a peckish hunger state. While this might confuse someone who doesn’t know what they are doing, their confusion is still going to lead them to the correct response: to eat enough food to get a genuinely positive hunger rating (and thus their nutrition scale is going back up). Hopefully at this point they will also check their character sheet and notice they a) have a bunch of negative modifiers on their stats and b) it is due to the Severe Malnutrition listed alongside ‘High on Heroin.’

Between all of that, I think it would be fine.

And just to address your alternative; simply affecting mood is not the objective I had in mind. It’s a very secondary effect. I’m actually more interested in malnutrition than I am food perception. A heroin addict not getting as large a mood adjustment from food isn’t going to prevent them from keeping their hunger state at a safe level. Which is one major danger with heroin and other opiate drugs - heroin and morphine are both well known for decreasing the appetite of the user to the point where they become malnourished. I think that could be well represented this way, and it also lends itself well to being plugged into other systems that might have similar effects, as with environmental factors.

There might be better methods of abstracting the hunger/nutrient dichotomy, but one which doesn’t address actual malnourishment isn’t really what I’m going for here.

4

On a related note it would be nice if starvation was handled a bit differently, like a short-term hunger rating and a long-term starvation rating like what The Unreal World uses.

Basically once short-term hunger rating maxes out you start gradually gaining ‘starvation’ points until you either max it out and die or find food, and once the short-term hunger is satiated, you start gradually losing starvation points until you’re back to baseline.

5

I actually like both systems, Hyena Grins and Rivets.

For an example I had Cycolospora a few weeks ago, (nasty bacterial infection). I was almost never hungerym and would go all day with only eating a bowl of cereal. In this case my percieved hunger was higher than it actually was, like HG illustrates. And I like Rivets because while I was eating next to nothing I lost 7 pounds, and that would kind of be like his long term hunger counter.

6

Yea, I think something like this is more realistic without going too far, really the baseline is still “eat when you’re hungry”, it just gets rid of some weird things like heroin actually negating nutrition. Similarly there’s a rest/tiredness dichotomy, where e.g. caffeine and other stimulants actually removes tiredness instead of just masking tiredness.

7

I like the hunger/nutrition dichotomy much better than the subjective/objective hunger dichotomy, and honestly I thought that’s what you were going for with this thread before reading it. However, we have to think about whether even this dichotomy is worth adding to the game.

From what I know about nutrition, the most common and prevalent form of malnutrition there is is scurvy, or lack of Vitamin C in the diet. Essentially, human beings are one of the only animals that can’t produce their own Vitamin C, which means that we’re dependent upon our nutrition to get it. This is as opposed to, say, Vitamin D, which we naturally produce from contact with sunlight. Scurvy itself is a pretty nasty disease that many of the first cross-atlantic voyagers routinely got, as they couldn’t get their hands on sources of Vitamin C due to their stale rations not containing any, and their lack of knowledge as to why scurvy occured. One of its main and most gruesome symptoms is that your teeth begin fall out.

Now, Vitamin C is present at sufficient amounts in any fresh vegetable matter (fruits or vegetables) or even in fresh meat. The meat, however, must be very fresh (i.e. consumed within a few hours), otherwise the Vitamin C gets broken down quite quickly. There are also other rather low-tech methods to avoid scurvy. Lemon juice possesses enough Vitamin C that even if kept for months, there’ll be a sufficient amount of non-degraded Vitamin C. Also, some North American Indians were able to prepare special hot teas out of tree bark that could stave off scurvy for the winter, a trick they showed westerners at their arrival.

What this means is that if a Cataclysm survivor eats only chips, soda, canned foods and beef jerky, he’ll get survy within weeks. This can be alleviated by eating even very small amounts of fresh meat or vegetables.

Now, I’m wondering if it actually makes sense to add this into the game. The timeframe for getting scurvy is multiple weeks, even months (do most characters live that long?) and the ways to combat it are pretty much things that a Cataclysm survivor must do, or else die of starvation anyways (have any of your characters gone weeks in-game without eating an animal they’ve hunted?). It’s only if you’re truly hiding out in a bunker with nothing but crackers for months that you’ll have to deal with scurvy, and I can’t imagine a player actually literally spending months not moving. That sounds boring beyond belief.

8

I think your ideas are a bit out of place xibalba, this thread was not about stats. (maybe create a new thread for your ideas.)

As for the actual nutrients that each individual would need. I am not too crazy about that because it seems that new players would get confused as to why their teeth are falling out and old players would just be annoyed as to having to run into town to find lemon juice.

Or for a different case say a lack of vitamin X, (not the actual vitamin, just a placeholder). Lets say that you can only get it from cola. And without it you face light speed penalty. New players would be saying “huh? Why am I moving slower?” while older players would just be annoyed that they have to leave their comfortable log home to go into town.

Unless there was a status effect that clearly explains each vitamin defficience, and how to get said vitamins than it would not work too well. Also, they are considering hunger (percieved and actual) in this thread, not nessesarily nutrition.

9

I’m going to agree that tracking whether the characters are meeting their RDA of different nutrients seems a bit excessive.

I realize my previous suggestion is more complex than what we currently have, but it’s still simple enough to be easy for anybody to pick up and understand; the basic premise is lifted from another roguelike which handles it in a very similar fashion and it’s quite intuitive.

Taking it further and back to the original concept, malnutrition does seem like a neat idea to implement, and I can easily see how to do so really easily while fixing the cold/flu problem at the same time: the current system assigns different foods a ‘healthiness’ value which seems to already correlate with the nutritional quality of the food. Currently when your invisible ‘healthiness’ stat drops low enough (and it’s always slowly dropping) you run the risk of catching a cold or the flu - that’s the game function of vitamins, they dramatically increase that hidden stat and stave off the risk of randomly catching those syndromes by raising that hidden stat in the same fashion as eating a ‘healthy’ diet. Note that some foods like junk food type things can even lower that hidden stat when you eat them.

What if instead of randomly catching the cold/flu syndrome when that hidden stat drops low, instead when it drops to a low enough threshold it’s guaranteed to give you a ‘malnourished’ syndrome that hurts your attributes or something and doesn’t go away until your ‘healthiness’ stat improves? To me, at least, this makes sense: eat junk food and nothing fresh, green, or nutritious and eventually you get weaker and slower until you get better quality food or at least start supplementing your potato chip and soda binges with some vitamins. It also gets rid of the weird thing where you catch a cold or the flu when you haven’t been in contact with any vectors for them. Perhaps in such a case we could save those syndromes in the code for once NPCs are in place and it would be more appropriate to come across human contact-specific diseases.

10

Only potential problem I recognize there is that the current hunger system is intended to handle starvation/stat drops from hunger. Most of that would probably have to be moved under malnutrition; hunger would probably affect morale/Focus instead.

(That’s not unrealistic. Ask any school and they’ll tell you that the kids learn better when fed, and ideally properly fed.)

11

For the record I actually would prefer a semi-complex nutritional system where different kinds of foods are needed to adequately stave off harmful malnutrition effects. I’ve played Skyrim with such a mod installed and I liked it.

I just don’t think most people want that level of detail, especially in Cataclysm where certain foods can be legitimately scarce.

So an abstracted nutritional system which relies more on maintaining a certain level of food intake (often in spite of how hungry you are) seems preferable. It allows people to largely play the game the same way they have been - eat food when you need it. But it does allow people to screw up their own rhythm by making poor choices. And also gives them a way to compensate.

Additionally you could also play with it a bit more, make nutrition drop more quickly (and increase more slowly) while healing, or while sick. As the body tends to use its resources more rapidly when it needs to repair itself.

And yeah, the same system would translate to other body-maintenance tasks like sleep and sleep deprivation. You can totally wind up with sleep deprivation without actually being tired, by taking stimulants or running on adrenaline.

After all, many things we experience subjectively are just messages our body is sending us. There are many situations where our body is not sending us the right messages, for one reason or another, so there should always be an objective/subjective dichotomy. So long as it doesn’t get to the point of being difficult and deceptive I think it could add a lot of depth to the game’s more menial aspects.

12

[quote=“Hyena Grin, post:11, topic:2342”]For the record I actually would prefer a semi-complex nutritional system where different kinds of foods are needed to adequately stave off harmful malnutrition effects. I’ve played Skyrim with such a mod installed and I liked it.

I just don’t think most people want that level of detail, especially in Cataclysm where certain foods can be legitimately scarce.

So an abstracted nutritional system which relies more on maintaining a certain level of food intake (often in spite of how hungry you are) seems preferable. It allows people to largely play the game the same way they have been - eat food when you need it. But it does allow people to screw up their own rhythm by making poor choices. And also gives them a way to compensate.

Additionally you could also play with it a bit more, make nutrition drop more quickly (and increase more slowly) while healing, or while sick. As the body tends to use its resources more rapidly when it needs to repair itself.

And yeah, the same system would translate to other body-maintenance tasks like sleep and sleep deprivation. You can totally wind up with sleep deprivation without actually being tired, by taking stimulants or running on adrenaline.

After all, many things we experience subjectively are just messages our body is sending us. There are many situations where our body is not sending us the right messages, for one reason or another, so there should always be an objective/subjective dichotomy. So long as it doesn’t get to the point of being difficult and deceptive I think it could add a lot of depth to the game’s more menial aspects.[/quote]

So something like healing/disease would increase hunger rate, and sleeping/waiting would decrease it? Is support that (IIRC sleeping already decreases it).

But I am not sure how much work would be needed. Would this be a milestone for say, 0.8 or something more like 999999999.9

13

Illness wouldn’t necessarily increase hunger but might increase the speed at which nutrition drops. In fact illness might often reduce the point at which your character actually shows as being hungry. Ie, they have less appetite and their body is using up resources faster than normal. Which is, y’know, realistic for the flu. When the illness ends the hunger base point would return to normal and you’d realize ‘oh I’m actually pretty hungry.’ Notably you shouldn’t be able to reach malnutrition levels just due to having the flu. But you very well could come out of it with a nutrition deficit if you weren’t actively eating more than your hunger level suggested you needed to.

The major point is that there are two eating strategies during play: Eat until you are no longer hungry (which, depending on your health and intoxication may not be sufficient to prevent malnutrition over the long term), or Eat until you are full (which will, under virtually all permutations of hunger modifiers, always grant you positive nutrition).

Anyway, I’m no coder so I wouldn’t presume to make a claim regarding the ease of implementation. I do know that balancing it might be tricky. Getting the nutrition bleed rate just right would mean making it intuitively manageable without making it a system that never actually rears its ugly head because it’s too easy to manage. Illness and drug use and sleep deprivation etc should all have enough of an impact that malnutrition could sneak up on you without having to go overboard with heroin binges before the system even comes into play.

As an aside, vitamins could give a flat increase to nutrition without having to wait for it to tick up, like you do with food. And you could give fruits/veggies a very minor stacking bonus to how quickly your nutrition ticks up (when in the positives) and how slowly it ticks down (when in the negatives). This would simulate the benefits of fruits and vegetables without actually forcing people to hunt them down to stay healthy. Basically it would let you gain nutrition faster (or lose nutrition more slowly) for a period after consuming veggies/fruits. Meanwhile junk food could have the reverse effect, slowing your rate of nutrition gain and speeding up the loss. So if you’re a heroin junkie eating nothing but junk food, you could get into trouble a lot faster than normal.

Lots of little ways to play with the numbers.

14

I have a question about this system. Say for example that somebody has the flu. Does their target hunger range decrease or is it just shift.
As an example I will use [b]ASCII ART[/i]:slight_smile:

Red: Hungry/Starving
Green: Satisfied
Blue: Stuff/Overeating

Standard:
[glow=red,2,300];;;;;[/glow][glow=green,2,300];;;;;[/glow][glow=blue,2,300];;;;;[/glow]

Target Hunger Range Decreases:
[glow=red,2,300];;;;;;;[/glow][glow=green,2,300];;;[/glow][glow=blue,2,300];;;;;[/glow]
See that red has grown, and the area you want to be in (green) has shrunk.

Target Hunger Range Shifts:
[glow=red,2,300];;;;;;;[/glow][glow=green,2,300];;;;;[/glow][glow=blue,2,300];;;[/glow]
See that green still has 5 ; but they are shifted so that you are more likely to be hungry and less likely to be stuffed.

COLORS :slight_smile:
[glow=red,2,300];;;;;[/glow][glow=green,2,300];;;;;[/glow][glow=blue,2,300];;;;;[/glow]
[glow=red,2,300];;;;;;;[/glow][glow=green,2,300];;;[/glow][glow=blue,2,300];;;;;[/glow]
[glow=red,2,300];;;;;;;[/glow][glow=green,2,300];;;;;[/glow][glow=blue,2,300];;;[/glow]

15

At least in the model I presented it would shift. When you have the flu, all hunger notifiers occurs at -10 to the base, for example.

And of course the actual point of nutritional balance (0) would remain constant. So it would look like this:

;;;;;;;;;[color=white]|[/color];;;;;;;;;;
<---- - | + ---->

The red comprises the normal stages where the game will alert the player that they are hungry. The green comprises a satisfied state where there are no messages. White is full, and blue is overeating (stuffed). Stuffed gives you temporary penalties to movement etc until your hunger decreases out of that stage, but longterm nutritional benefits.

The center line indicates the 0 point where nutrition level remains stable. If your hunger state is right of that you are gaining nutrition. If it is left of it you are losing it. ‘Peckish’ occurs in the red space right of the line. When you are healthy, this acts a buffer zone, essentially, reminding you to eat while you are still in positive nutrition.

If you are unhealthy and experiencing -10 to hunger, it would look like this:

;;;;;;;;;;[color=white]|[/color];;;;;;;;;;
<---- - | + ---->

And if it were as bad as -20 it would look like this:

;;;;;;;;;;[color=white]|[/color];;;;;;;;;;
<---- - | + ---->

So you can see that you become ‘satisfied’ at a state where you are still losing nutrition. But there is still plenty of room for you to eat healthily and maintain a positive nutritional intake. I think a worst case scenario might be -50 (stacked influence from illness, drugs, sleep deprivation and environment) and look like this:

;;;;;;;;;;[color=white]|[/color];;;;;;;;;;
<---- - | + ---->

In that situation you must pretty much eat as much as you can and stay ‘full’ to maintain positive nutrition intake. Your stomach is protesting and doesn’t want food. At that point you might be better off medicating yourself by smoking marijuana or taking something else that has an appetite stimulant effect, to counter everything else.

16

another way would be to give each food 2 nutritional stats : calories and proteins (as a very simplified model). While calories would directly impact hunger, proteins would affect health/stats (for exaple a lack of proteins would give the malnourished effect - 2 strenght, or something). This way, while never getting hungry by eating chips and cola, in time an additional effect like cold, overburden, etc. would appear in the stats screen.
Though, tbh, it’ s almost impossible to avoid eating proteins in game. Maybe adding a third food stat - vitamins, with only one of the stats with a visual impact ( proteins and vitamins would affect hidden stats, calories would affect hunger)…
Meh, there is too much food in the game, if the food was scarcer maybe such a system would pose a chalange, as it is it would only be a nuisance…

17

If I did anything with nutrition stats for foods beyond what we have now (quench, nutrition, and health), I’d go whole hog and do the full gamut of calries, carbs, fats, fibre, vitamins, minerals, etc… Probably not going to happen though. Not to mention it’d be a PITA for modders, because they’d have to input all that crap.