Nourishment/Cooking System Flaws and Improvement Suggestions

[lord_yoshi]

This thread is to talk about the nourishment and cooking system shortcomings and how those issues should be addressed.

• Player Hunger Value Is Not Intuitive
  • Player hunger is a number that normally reads from 0 to 1800, but each .01 kg unit of food eaten reduces hunger by 5.
  • I would suggest that the hunger value range should be reduced to 0 to 360, with each .01 kg unit of food reducing hunger by 1. This suggestion would functionally change nothing, but would make the hunger system a lot more intuitive for newer players.
• Stamina Reserves Drain Too Quickly
  • Every point of health/stamina/mana that is deducted from your current values is also deducted from your reserves in a 1:1 ratio. While this might be fine for health and mana, stamina is used by almost everyone and players can easily drain thousands of stamina points in less than ten IRL minutes. Since players only have around 20000-25000 total stamina reserves, it becomes very tedious to constantly eat high stamina nourishment food to avoid grey bar.
  • I suggest to increase the reserve drain ratios so that several points need to be spent to reduce the reserves by 1. The ratio can be tweaked later on to get the right amount of time between meals. This is a quality of life improvement to allow players more time to enjoy the game instead of micromanaging their rapidly depleting stamina reserves.
• Cooking System Favors Single Ingredient Meals
  • The best nourishing meals are made with a single ingredient. The cooking system does not have nourishment multipliers, and since some ingredients have both high nourishment value and high quality, the result is more advanced recipes are completely ignored because they aren't as good as just using a single ingredient.
  • My suggestion is to alter the system to make the very high nourishing ingredients have poor quality so you have to use other ingredients to boost the meal quality and maximize the nourishment. The very high nourishing ingredients should have their nourishment values greatly increased to compensate for using more ingredients.

 

[BigRed]

It would be useful to give some kind of indication when approaching weight loss or gain, maybe even stopping eating automatically at that point. This is a huge problem for a lot of “action“ players as it can wreck their carefully manicured attributes.

It would be convenient to have reserves optionally showing on the HUD, either as part of the health bars or separately.

I would also consider inverting the hunger number to show “fullness” rather than “hunger”, as I’ve heard multiple players think removing hunger is the way to restoring reserves. Hunger has a negative connotation in a way that fullness doesn’t.

Part of the problem with food more generally is that sophistication isn’t going to be a big enough draw for many people to actually change their diet. Eating raw pig should make you sick to your guts. Eating bread should be preferable to some toasted grain because it’s more easily digested. Right now it seems the system only considers the raw nutritional value of an ingredient, and not whether people could actually digest it and process that nutrition. It feels like the system is too “single-minded” in that calorific numbers go in, reserve numbers come out. It needs either another couple of systems added like rot and digestion, or for the named recipes to be buffed. Digestion could be represented by ”digestible“ food taking away less hunger.

Adding preservatives and curing and food rot would give even more for cooks to work on. Being able to make jerky and hard tack biscuits for taking on a long march would be fulfilling and realistic. Basically durability for food.

 

[Weathermore]

There are a few main issues here that need to be addressed:

1. health pool is radically lower than stamina.

2. Many things can take stamina and no health. Mounted archer hunt for an hour and tell me how you’re going to get stamina reserves back without taking damage or getting fat.

3. There are no “pure” foods, IE high stam
Food has small health bonuses.

4. The highest single stat food are drastically better than multi stat foods.

5. “Pure” foods (one stat) can be made without advanced cooking & cooking tools. It’s a joke. The high end food needs buffs added, such as 30 minute heal over time, to make high end chefs worth something.

The reserves system is definitely not in a good place. The best thing that could happen is not tie weight to reserves, and come up with a new system for that. Specific foods (weight gain-weight loss food recipes) would be the easiest way. Basically the same way height is currently
Handled (set at character creation, food required).

because you don’t lose stats in a certain order,everyone will always be making pure food.