Food System Tweak

[Omicron 62]

This aims to propose a minimally invasive solution to address a small issue.

 

 

 

Thesis:

The current implementation of how food works relegates the whole "make meals" game mechanic to a mere gimmick.

 

Refresher on how food works, for context:

The food bar drains passively at a fixed rate, plus actively on performing certain activities (breaking blocks, recovering health etc). The rate at which the player recovers health increases the fuller the food bar is. You can restore the food bar by eating food; consuming 10 stars worth of food restores 100% of the food bar. Generally, one day of normal activity costs the player around 2-3 stars worth of food.

 

Refresher on how meals work, for context:

By combining ingredients of at least 4 stars worth of food, a meal will be created which often will perform better than the sum of its parts, or give the player buffs in a way that's very similar to potions. Meal recipes and effects are randomized via the world seed. A meal will only give its full effect if it is warmed in a fireplace/forge; if eaten cold, it will always perform worse than the sum of its parts.

 

Why these two systems don't play nice together:

Because you need to invest at least 4 stars worth of food, the minimum meal actually worth making for its food value is one that's worth at least 5 stars. This means that at bare minimum, the player's food bar must be down halfway. This not only takes multiple ingame days of playtime, but also is a state that's highly undesirable to maintain. After all, a food bar that's half empty (or more than half empty) represents a serious reduction in the player's health regeneration capabilities (both in how quickly it happens as well as how much can be regenerated in total). The player is therefore encouraged to keep his food bar well up. It feels better and safer to eat one item worth two stars every day, rather than waiting three days until there's room in your belly for the six-star meal that these three ingredients could make. And some meals are so powerful that you can never really use them - if you wait until your food bar runs out all the way, you'll start taking damage and possibly have to play with debuffs for being hungry for a while.

 

This compounds with the fact that sometimes, you need food now. In combat, you want your health to be regenerating quickly, so you want your food bar to be maxed. And in combat, you can't ask mister skeleton to take a break shooting you while you set up a campfire to warm your meal. It's a much better idea to keep the ingredients with you and eat them individually.

 

Add to this the fact that getting food is really quite easy. Killing a pig has you set for two ingame weeks, for instance. Making a meal that's worth more than the sum of its parts would let you stretch a scarce food supply to last longer, but food is basically never scarce to begin with. The player consumes only a small part of their food bar each day.

 

As for buffs, they face the same issue of "can't cook a meal in combat". Setting up for a fight this way would likely be the absolute exception, probably reserved for bossfights like the Wither or the Ender Dragon... neither of which exists in TFC. And buffing yourself with water breathing out of combat is also situational. Therefore the buffs alone can't carry the meal-making system to any kind of relevance.

 

To sum up: almost any incentive to make a meal is currently marginalized because eating ingredients is simply more useful to the player.

 

How this can be changed with minimal effort:

The first issue relates to the fact that meals are so large the food bar needs to be nearly empty for them to make sense. As a solution, I propose to simply double the amount of food that is "stored" in the food bar, while leaving all other values the same. As a result, a 10-star meal would fill half the food bar instead of all of it. At the same time, the food bar would take twice as long to drain empty (this does not impair believability; a human can go much longer without food IRL than the 4-5 days the player currently can ingame). This measure handily removes the need to let the food bar drop way low in order to actually make use of a meal; it can be eaten much more regularly. It also motivates players into looking at meals in the first place because the common food items now appear really tiny all of a sudden (although in reality they are still exactly as valuable as they were before).

 

The second issue relates to how having to heat meals up is unwieldly when you are in a hurry. I propose to leave that as it is, as it's a reasonable tradeoff for the increased value that meals provide. Since the other changes help actually realizing that value, the tradeoff can stay.

 

The third issue relates to how food is so abundant that making meals to keep yourself fed is entirely unnecessary. I propose that since we now have a doubled food buffer from suggestion 1, there's room to increase food consumption. However, we don't want to make starting a new world too hard by upping the food need to the point where playing hunter/gatherer is no longer sufficient to make it through the stone age. Thus I propose to only up the food drain from active sources that are typical for midgame activities, such as breaking blocks with tools (mining is an absolutely backbreaking labor that burns through calories, after all). That way, a new player punching rocks and leaves is not affected, but a player axing rows upon rows of trees or carving out a vein of ore will be. Combat, too, can be upped a bit, as freshly started players are not equipped for more than small scuffles anyway. For the mentioned actions, I suggest maybe an increase of around 50% over its current values. Passive drain wouldn't need to be modified, but it could probably be given a +10% or +20% if it's desired to make food more valuable in general or counterbalance the increased time a player can go without eating.

 

Bottomline:

This way, the entire food system can be leaned towards encouraging the making of meals simply by tweaking a small number of global constants; it can probably (I hope) be implemented in a mere fraction of the time that it took me to write up this post. At the same time, it will be a subtle change that doesn't actually make the core gameplay or progression any different, especially not for fresh starts.

[Kazahied 42]

Sounds good, this would also passively re-balance the opness of grain products. By mid game a decent sized village can completely survive on a 10 x 10 plot of grain. With plenty excess to do as they please. 

 

It wouldn't fix it completely (just make a bigger farm) but it would cut down on food stores much more rapidly.

[AllenWL 186]

But while eating non-meals is the best for beginnings, I find meals and heavy food to be really helpful after I build up, get the cool gear, and start building one-man cities.

I rarely bump into mobs, and I don't get hurt often, so why spend half my day chomping on beans when I can keep hot meals on me 24/7?

[Omicron 62]

It's the "keeping hot meals on me" part. They don't stay hot, they cool down fairly rapidly. If you heat up a meal worth 5 stars and then keep it in your inventory, it will be cold long before the food bar has gone down even a fifth of the way necessary to make it useful.

 

In practical gameplay you keep cold meals in your inventory and then when it's time to eat, you either make a firepit on the spot or go find your forge, leaving whatever else you were doing at the time. That's more invconvenient than just quickly cycling to an item on your hotbar and holding right mouse for 3 seconds.

[akbalox 4]

meals don't chill inside vessels it's the miners lunch box of choice!

they stack up hot if you're lucky enough to have 2 with the exact same heat value:p

[AllenWL 186]

Do you need hot meals?

I don't really care as long as I can fill up my hunger bar quickly

[Omicron 62]

meals don't chill inside vessels it's the miners lunch box of choice!

they stack up hot if you're lucky enough to have 2 with the exact same heat value:p

 

Now that's a neat trick to keep in mind! Lunchbox, I like it