Dynamically scaling hunger and more food

[TheBadger]

In an attempt to make survival and similar activities more interesting, I had a thought.

I like the current hunger mechanic, but it feels under utilized. It offers nice challenge in early stages of a game, where you might not be able to reliably afford food or somehow make it yourself... but later stages of the game it can be relatively trivialized with a large enough farm for mass production of farm product and it's related foods.

As a way to make hunger more... interesting? Demanding? Meaningful past early game survival? Why not have a hunger rate multiplier that scales based on a character's current status and activity? Food isn't just nutrients, it's calories. Calories that we burn when we do things.

Strength training can be made more interesting/harder/less AFK intensive by applying an increase to hunger rate based on how overloaded a character is, so not only are you moving slower(which can always be overcome by leaving the game at max speed for a while), you are also getting hungrier faster trying to haul something you can't carry very well. Stronger characters(and pack animals!) can carry more before the penalties start to set in. This also makes the encumbrance reduction trait of good backpacks presumably more important.

Physical and manual labor is something that burns a lot of nutritional energy as well. Mining with pickaxes, operating heavy manual machinery, and even harvesting crops are all physically intensive tasks which are also generally important to running a base. It would make it more important to keep a particularly large and industrious workforce well fed, and would be an interesting complication to early base development. It would also be all the more important to defend your farms from scavengers and random predators like raptors.

Both of those factors combined would also make it significantly harder to do some of the more cheesy things like leaving the game running on max speed for a few hours to mine massive amounts of copper to sell for money.

However, in order to really feel some of these changes, it might also do to make making food an all together more involved process. I won't suggest anything so much as making food doing anything more than making you less hungry as it already does, but the current selection of food is not only rather limited, but some are also far too easy to produce large amounts of through automated/permanent jobs.

Expanding animal products might be a good start, with different types, cuts, and flavors of meats and other biological byproducts from animal corpses. Animals like bulls and/or goats could have decent amounts of prime, usable meat that makes good food, while more strange(like beak things) or low level(like raptors) could produce largely gamy or even disgusting meats that require significant preparation to even be edible. On top of that, anatomical byproducts like intestines could be used to make other types of food like sausage, or cuts of animal fat could go to making an ambrosial feast of a meal. Animal nests could have eggs you can use for cooking as well, giving more reasons to raid them.

Of course, the whole point of expanding the variety of cooking ingredients and the foods made from them is to make the whole process of cooking not only more intensive(and this harder to fully automate for extended periods of time), but also to make it more rewarding for the effort. Survival or otherwise basic foods should be relatively easy to make or otherwise have access to, but are just that. They will not keep you fed for long, and carrying a sack full of bread and foodcubes gets tiring and annoying after a while. Going through the effort of making GOOD, HEALTHY food with ingredients that may have to come from different sources(hunting and farming) that may also require more than one stage of preparation, should be substantially more filling.

After all, after a long day of mining ore and hauling rocks all over the place, would you rather have a dozen dustwiches, or some juicy gorillo steaks? Beak thing burgers? Raptor hot dogs? Vegetables braised in animal fat? Omelettes? A feast that would make even Okran's mouth water!

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TL;DR: Hunger should increase faster when doing physically demanding activities like overweight hauling and/or physically intensive labor. Compensate for the resultant increase in demand for food with a wider variety of higher NU-yield foods that are more difficult to mass produce over extended periods of time via automation and permanent jobs. Maybe correspondingly nerf basic and pure survival foods to encourage leaning towards full meals whenever possible.

[dirkleton]

To be perfectly and totally honest with you, I agree; I'd also uninstall the game if they went this particular route. Hunger is already enough as it is and this would make the early game simply too difficult.

Sleep needs to be this mitigating factor.

[Ocram]

I for one likes this. It adds some interesting mechanics. Sleep would be just forcing you to do nothing, but while you drain hunger you are skilling strenght. Also like the better scaling food variety.

[dirkleton]

Sleep doesn't force you to do nothing. It enforces reality on your characters, drastically reduces the output of all production (including food), and generally gives you a reason to build beds.

[Sol Lignum]

I'm sure it would add a certain amount of realistic difficulty, after all, we've got increased hunger rates for doges and Shek, and i've not seen anyone complaining about it.

You have too keep in mind early-game as well, when running scared is your best friend, and hunger is your worst enemy.

However, while it's all great and fun, i believe that at the moment, Lo-Fi has already got enough weight to pull. To the degree that if someone were to ask my opinion, i'd suggest to close the entire Feature Request section for a while, untill current major issues are resolved. Namely, what floats in mind: some ranged AI shenanigans, half-working diplomacy, and the goddamn walls that since their very release has been a pain in the back to so many.

And i'm sure there're some other issues that i've either forgotten or never heard of.

Don't get me wrong, i love feature request, and thanks to it we've seen some awesome things, and, in fact, we've got Kenshi as it is today, but i also have a stong feeling that if devs will be kept bombarded by interesting and tempting ideas, we'll never have the game released in a finished state.

maybe i'm panicking though, and maybe it's not an issue at all

[Grimmrok]

Sleep needs to be this mitigating factor.

Stop. Suggesting. Sleep.
I for one would uninstall the game if sleep became a thing.

It's not about "realism", it's about something tedious that prevents you from playing the game.
For a set amount of time your characters have to sleep while you blankly stare at the screen. Every ingame day. Miss me with that. Don't ruin this game for an extra layer of "realism".
Or else while you're at it make the need to defecate so those outhouses in towns have a use.
While at it give us thirst as well.
And exhaustion from running so we have to walk for a set a mount of time, or even sit to catch a breath.
Maybe give us infections from untreated wounds.
Etc.

Bottom line:
Realism doesn't always translate to fun.

[Hatsune_Neko]

Would like to point out the Dev's position on hunger.

It was never ment to be a full on micromanaging aspect in the game. Its more of a afterthought and background clutter.
Your supposed to know its there but also its not suposed to rule your entire game play.

Once you make enough, it becomes a minor feature as you play. When its working correctly that is.

[dirkleton]

Stop. Suggesting. Sleep.

Never will I ever.

[TheBadger]

It was never ment to be a full on micromanaging aspect in the game.

I can respect that.

Thinking back, more food types was just kind of an afterthought, something to balance out the increased hunger rates with higher NU foods that might take an extra step or two to make. This is partially because our food options involving meat are still incredibly micromanagement heavy from having to manually loot things from animals all the time. It's generally not worth it compared to automating a massive farm to produce endless food cubes. I am aware that a "Foraging Animals" job exists, but it only seems to partially work and even then only sporadically.

The dynamically scaling hunger is really more intended for early game though, specifically to deal with the trend of people running around massively overencumbered for a few hours to train strength. It's just not fun when your first evening or two in a new game is to leave the game running for hours to make someone just mindlessly run around for hours on end. Maybe at least if it encouraged using that time to make more of an active income to keep yourself fed or something.

[Ocram]

from having to manually loot things from animals all the time.

A note about this: you can make Foraging work by giving characters also the job to haul to the respective containers, meat and skins. Just figured out recently, it's not that intuitive since every other job automatically unload stuff in the appropriate containers.

I still like dynamic hunger and better scaling food. I mean I get that food shouldn't be the first priority at every stage of the game, but, while it also is currently, you would end up consuming less and less food the more you are skilled in strenght, effectively lowering the late (per character) game food needings, I don't see why it shouldn't be the primary "objective" on a new game tho, makes much more sense to start from a little farm than a stone mine.

[Abstracted]

This is why I am really hoping after v1 they start opening up the FCS. People can make bigger and more involved mods, ultimately leaving it up to the individual to shape their game beyond what the developers planned by picking and choosing mods.

Though I can already see the nightmares of added bugs, performance and incompatibility issues.

[UltraDelux]

I'm all for this dynamic hunger. If your argument against it is, realism doesn't equal fun, then I'd say alot of the time it does. Add an option to turn it off, nothing wrong with that. If your argument against it is the devs have other things to worry about, yes. Yes they do. But that's no reason not to suggest a feature, unless you think the devs have really bad attention deficit disorder. From what I hear that's the fate of Star Citizen . I'm also all for sleep... IF a higher degree of warp can be implemented. Again, you should be able to disable these things in difficulty options. I know some people will disagree with being able to toggle major gameplay mechanics on and off, but especially in games with alot of mechanics operating on gameplay, there's nothing wrong with it. I will defend this position if need be, with the help of Bonesnap and a skullcap socketed with a chipped diamond.

[Grimmrok]

I'm all for this dynamic hunger.

Dynamic hunger is already implemented into the game.
Examples: When you're encumbered and moving you have a higher hunger rate than when standing idle or when you're sleeping you have the lowest hunger rate.

I'm also all for sleep... IF a higher degree of warp can be implemented. Again, you should be able to disable these things in difficulty options. I know some people will disagree with being able to toggle major gameplay mechanics on and off, but especially in games with alot of mechanics operating on gameplay, there's nothing wrong with it.

This can be taken to a new thread (or actually one of the many threads that keep talking about "sleep"), but no, mandatory sleep isn't going to be implemented. Enough with it already.

[UltraDelux]

Look at that, I read the updates and its there. I guess we win. Yup. Off to pedal the implementation of sleep.

[bk3000]

I am aware that a "Foraging Animals" job exists, but it only seems to partially work and even then only sporadically.

No that actually works well, but the animal must be dead rather than merely knocked out. That might be where you think it isn't working. If animals are still alive, you need to manually loot them - which BTW will kill the animal.

It works better to have a container they can drop the meat off... like a cooking fire with someone assigned to use it. Likewise a container that accepts animal skins.