Wild Veggies only 26 calories. Build 8547

[Rook275]

I don’t know why it’s so low it makes even forging for them not even an option. Did someone forget to add a 0?

[dissociativity]

as far as I’m aware their low calories is realistic, they’re mainly an ingredient for other recipes and a means of getting vitamins more than anything, if you want more calories try cattails, nuts (including pine nuts), acorns, dahlia roots

Spinach irl for example has 24 calories per 100 grams, it’s similar in consistency to that.

[Rook275]

well damn math checks out. didn’t see that the weight got changed too. well dang my vegetation run just got much harder. thanks for the reply.

[Mantar]

Problem with using them as an ingredient is that it feeds into the end product’s calorie count and you end up with stuff like the 87-calorie pancake.

Some of the recipes ought to be changed to use more of a given calorie-nerfed item, to keep calorie counts reasonable. I may work on that if I get a chance, it should be an easy set of fixes, but IRL’s got me tied up right now.

[Medi_Ding]

Don’t lose hope! In case you don’t know yet and you don’t have the grain intolerance trait, you can search swamps for cattails and turn them into flour for vegetable pies.

[Tazeell]

One of the reasons I don’t mind all my characters ending up inevitably mutating carnivore. Meat is love, meat is life, meat is calories and a hell of a lot less work.

[Trigon]

With the butchering changes being a carnivore is a lot more viable. It used to be a colossal pain in the ass. Especially with high metabolism traits.

[Esther]

Gonna give my cash card ($0.02) here - meat is indeed love and life. In fact, one thing in particular has carried me - fat. It’s unhealthy as heck, but one chunk of fat has almost 2000 calories. Thus, anything based from fat can feed you for a lot. I tend to cook it into cracklins - you get 7, and each has about 300 calories and a pretty good enjoyment value.

If you’re concerned entirely with preservation, tallow lasts for a while and has crazy calories, but is extremely unhealthy. Mix it with some dehydrated foods, though, and you can get pemmican, which lasts functionally forever. Sausage is good, too.

I often straight-up subsist off of cracklins and water, especially if you get the Leukocyte Breeder to make the health not matter. Some healthy pine needle tea or protein shakes throughout the day can keep you from getting too unhealthy.

[Tazeell]

Best part of cracklins is that even when they are 100% rotted out and worth zero calories you still get only positive morale from them. Dehydrated meat is still probably the best way to live, that stuff lasts years.

[VIVIT]

Part of the reason why this doesn’t seem right is because the current nutritional system is in a really weird place right now: it judges how filling a meal is based entirely on calorie count, when in real life it’s an aggregate of multiple different factors, not insignificantly including how physically full your stomach is. Under the previous, abstract system, foods were given a nourishment rating (I don’t remember specifically what it was called) based on an abstract estimate of how filling they would be. Now that we have sophisticated nutrition mechanics, nourishment ratings were overhauled to move toward a calorie system, but (I think) the hunger mechanics still work the same under the hood.

[Erk]

That’s not really accurate. They used to have a vague “nutrition” stat, but that was converted directly to calories, using a formula; it wasn’t changed in the code at all (at least not more recently than like 2015)

The incoming model to use fullness of stomach to represent hunger levels is the first time I can find in the source that anything besides food energy was ever used for hunger.

Regarding wild vegetables, they’re one of the best ways to keep your vitamin and health levels up at early phases of the game. The actual raw calories to survive from the bushes can come from bird eggs, which are a pretty common find. Someone could go through and add some other common forage results from new england springtime, like burdock root… Really though, early spring is a very spartan time for foragers and the solution isn’t to make it ridiculously easy to find food, it’s to move the default game start to a time that’s less hard to survive.

[Trigon]

Erk is right here. Early spring is brutal for anything that can’t scavenge meat from some source or another. Even humans have had trouble with it in ancient times given that their winter larder is empty and they won’t have a full harvest for some time yet.

Herbivores faces a similar problem in that many of their regular food sources would be unavailable, luckily (if you want to look at it like that) predators culled the population enough that most could get by with what little there was.

Im definitely interested to see where the new hunger model goes though. I’m kind of glad wild vegetables aren’t as good as meat steaks now.

[Vastin]

Well, the overall calories of a food item are a reasonably accurate measure of how long it’ll keep you going, energy wise. There are some variances tho - for example, it takes a certain number of calories to DIGEST the food in the first place, which is why we like to cook food. Cooking food doesn’t make it any more caloric, but it does usually make it a good bit easier/quicker to digest, so you can actually end up getting more caloric value out of it after cooking. In game terms you could probably just treat this as a modest bonus to the total caloric value of a meal after cooking. Close enough.

Fullness is of course another thing altogether. Fullness doesn’t have much to do with caloric value or vice-versa - whereas I think the current food system in CDDA treats them as synonymous values?

Not sure I really care, but you can totally stuff yourself with foodstuffs that have little or no caloric value, and proceed to starve to death in the real world, whereas some other foods are very calorically dense but not very filling (many kinds of candy, for example).

[Aluminumfoil]

The calories per unit mass is about right. I think the mistakes are:

1: No batch time savings. This is a really easy fix that anybody can make for their own game. Simply navigate to blablabla\data\json\recipes\food.json, do a search for
result": "veggy_wild_cooked"
and under Autolearn type the line
"batch_time_factors": [ 80, 4 ],
or whatever you prefer (first number is time savings, second number is threshold) so you aren’t painstakingly cooking one root at a time while you starve to death.

2: Low number of units found per search, relatively high probability of finding units even at low survival skill. I don’t know how to edit this one myself, but I’d suggest returning about 2d6 units per successful search, making the success rate per survival skill much worse at low survival skill, and then applying a massive penalty to quantity found and a more mild penalty to success rate during winter.

My thoughts being that because plants tend to grow in large groups of the same plant, somebody searching for food during the growing season would be limited by knowing where to find a group of plants and how to recognize it as food if they did, not by the amount of that plant available in the patch.

Low Skill: “Oh look, a lone violet. How pretty. I wish I had food.”
Medium Skill: “Oh look, a lone violet. I could eat it, but it doesn’t even qualify as a snack. There must be another patch of fiddlehead ferns around here somewhere.”
High Skill: “Oh look, a lone violet. I know what kind of light conditions and soil conditions there are, and I’ve noticed the prevailing wind direction and where other plants are growing, so I bet there’s a good sized cluster of tasty plants right… around… here.”

[QuietCoyote]

Well, not to go off topic a lil bit, but sugar is a lot worse for a person, because someone’s body will only store the fat because they have a lot of sugar in their body.