Dynamically scaling hunger and more food
Posted: Tue Apr 17, 2018 10:25 pm
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.
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!
--------------------------------------
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.
. 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. 
