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Bioxx

Food + Taste + Hunger

75 posts in this topic

First of all, I know that there is a thread for taste already here in the suggestions forum but I'll be closing it so that I can have a more directed conversation here, outside of the conversations that have already taken place there. I'm going to discuss the core food mechanics first and then we'll discuss taste.

 

Food:

As it stands in TFC1 each type of food is represented by a food group. The players nutrition levels are adjusted by eating food from this food group and their maximum life total is dependent entirely upon their nutrition level. Right now, I plan to leave that specific mechanic alone as I think most players understand it and are in favor of how it works. 

 

Since TFC2 will be a bit more action oriented, I've decided to add a new mechanic to meals in order to make them more appealing to spend the time to make. When a player eats a meal, not only will hunger be filled, but the player will gain an amount of postponed health regen to go along with it. This means that if the player takes damage from some source, after leaving combat, they will be able to regen their health at a significantly increased rate at the expense of this saved up regen. Eating meals that the player prefers will give you more of this postponed regen.

 

Now to the topic of food decay. I am actively looking for the best way to change the decay mechanic entirely. While the TFC1 mechanic worked as intended, we can all agree that the amount of micromanaging that it caused was no fun at all. I have been toying with the idea of a system similar to how Ark does decay which is a simple time based system. For instance, a strawberry may decay in 5 minutes real time, whereas an egg may take 2 hours real time. Implementing this in as simple a way as possible would be the key here as I'd rather not spend weeks trying to get this right like I did in TFC1. The final result of this change would mean that there is no compounding decay and no reason to micromanage your food supplies. This also means that the system of food weight would also be tossed since it is also a very heavy and unwieldy system to have to tiptoe around when making new content. All food would exist in stacks just like in vanilla which would make things far simpler on the backend as well as making tfc more approachable by newer players.

 

Taste:

One of the things that I want to do is find a way to simplify the taste experience so that there is less confusion as to just how it works. To this day there are far too many players that have played hundreds of hours and still don't know some of the simpler concepts. This is my fault for presenting it in such a poor way.

 

As a result, I am considering tossing most of the taste system as it stands today and instead using a preferred food system. This would be similar to taste in that it would be different in every new world. A player would need to try a particular type of food at least once in order to see if they like it or not. Having your preferred food prepared in a certain way could also open the door for more distinct preferences per player. This would of course not negate the fact that you need to keep your nutrition levels up by eating things that you may not prefer. I have seen people ask for a well fed buff which boosts your abilities in some way. While I can't at this time comment on how that would take shape precisely, I can see it as a definite addition.

 

Feel free to discuss and provide your own thoughts on the matter.

 

And please for the love of god, if you plan to type out a very large response, format it in a way which we can easily read it.

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So far I like all of that. specially the simplification of the taste system.

I still think a nutrition system that called for more variety in the diet would be a good idea.

When I look at the mod I see so much work in creating all those different vegetables, crops and fruits.

Adding a nutrition system would make more believable and also give the player a reason to diversify the food production.

Based on the existing system where the player gets 200 points for each food group, to a total of 1000 points.

In a nutrition system after getting all the 5 food groups the player could start diversity to increase his health points.

So once you get to the 1000 points you can get up to 3000 points as long as you eat a balanced diet of 3 different food from each food group.

This would also have the advantage of freeing xp points to be used in some magical system.

This would give the player a reason to plant different crops.

The perfect sandwich that you can eat over and over again would only make sense if you could say you were not sick and tired of eating turkey on the third day after thanks giving. 

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+Happyness,  all food fullfill your hungry needs!
But only things you like, make you happy!

Onions!

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Promoting variety by keeping a list of recently eaten foods not a direction that I want to go. I highly disliked the unwieldy nature of it in the modpacks that I've tried. All that ever seemed to accomplish was to make me have to figure out the order to eat things in so that I could bypass that mechanic and still only ever eat like 4 or 5 things.

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Cant talk about coding of the tracking mechanism. In the end I am no coder.

As far as gaming go in tfc we already eat 5 things, even though we concentrate all in a single meal. My idea was more in the way of having different meals that would combine and make complete meals. It should not be hard on the player to manage 3 different meals, that would actually use 15 different things.

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Sounds good, but take care not to "dumb down" mechanics from TFC 1 too much. 

 

Also, the taste system in TFC 1 is barely interesting to me. I never find much variety of food to be able to micromanage the perfect taste recipe for a meal.

 

I also still miss the "potion effects" from eating salads that were in the earlier TFC builds...

Edited by Terex
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A concern I have is that if you switch to an ARK-style decay system, you're just moving the micro-management from the decay mechanic to the harvesting mechanic. In ARK, there is a viable food source almost everywhere and there are no seasons, so you basically have to just remember to harvest something to eat from time to time. Food you collect in one play session is not going to be there next time you log on (without preservation) so you often just grab food every time you start playing. It's not a big deal in that environment.

 

But in an environment where wild crops only appear in some places and the growing and harvesting seasons come and go, there's much more burden on the player to keep fresh food around, and planning to make sure it'll be there in the future. This could go either way.

 

It could make the farming and preserving systems much more engaging (right now, I just grab every wild plant I see, shove seeds in the ground, harvest everything when I get around to it, and cut decay from time to time). It might make it more fun to strategically time harvests of different foods, have preserving barrels strategically available, manage livestock better, etc.

 

It could also just turn into a grind where exploring and mining is continually cut short because the calendar and/or decay timers demand it. ("Ugh, I have 6 minutes to get back to base, or I'm about to get stuck in a starvation death-loop.")

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This raises a lot of questions for me.  But to start:

STACKING

Food stacking rather than weight sounds ok to me.  I'd assume that one food unit would equal about 5oz of the current system, so any harvesting/butchering bonuses would simply result in more individual food items of that type.  Seems totally fine to me.

 

DECAY

So using an ark-style decay system (I've never played Ark), how will the stacking work when you have a stack that's decayed partially, and you add a fresh food?  Does it do a weighted average?  This would be like Don't Starve, which I have played. At low stacks, you can effectively 'refresh' your existing food with new food by averaging.  But there's a tipping point where adding fresh to too big a decayed stack basically results in mostly losing freshness, because it's a weighted average.  I think it'd work.  I never really minded the food management system as it was, but then, I stuck with mild climates and just harvested food as needed, so it was never a problem for me.   Presumably the decay timer would still be paused on smp servers, if the player doesn't log in for X hours.

 

I agree with Micmastadon, that it will change the preservation dynamic.   Right now I favor settling in mild climates around 7k latitudes, and just leaving the food in the ground continually, and harvesting it whenever I need it.  Avoid having to deal with preservation at all, really.  The new system sounds like it might make that non-workable, depending on how long the decay timers actually are.  5 minutes sounds rather too short to me.  But, depending on what the goals are for cooking and the food system in general, maybe that's where you want to go.  If there were ways for the player to process raw food into forms that are more durable - hard tack, biscuits, etc, that would be fine I think.  Pickling could remain the ultimate preservation, but effectively non-transportable, while certain food preparation methods could add greatly to durability (at the sacrifice of satiation and regen mechanic).  So with a few different prep methods, the player can choose whether they're preparing for battle, preparing for a long trip, or something else.  I think that would be good.

 

TASTE

Now as for taste, I don't think it's necessary to toss that baby out just yet.  I think perhaps one of the major problems with the TFC1 taste system is that the taste profiles are relative to the player, and the way it was described was not really good.  It could be confusing when a food said "not sweet" and yet, you know that food adds sweetness, either through pure logic (it's a pile of sugar) or because your sandwich is very sweet, yet none of the individual ingredients indicate any sweetness.   This is confusing.   

 

I think it would have been better if "not X" had LITERALLY meant it had 0 of that flavor.  For TFC2 I think we should have more descriptors - barely, hardly, kind of, somewhat, fairly, rather, very, extremely, ridiculously, absurdly.  That's 10 right there.  So associate those to the various 10ths of flavor scale (I'm not sure how far the actual numbers go).   The player could have half as many descriptors to start with (but anything above 0 still gets a descriptor), then the full 10, then actual numbers at intervals of 5 or whatever, and finally exact numbers.  And then the key: the descriptors are the same for everyone, so that its logical to new players.   So 45 savory gives the same descriptor for everyone.   I think just having a uniform descriptor system might help a lot. 

 

Then, the player has to determine where on this uniform scale this particular character falls.  The way this is done could vary in a few ways.  It probably won't be as subtle and require as much experimentation as the TFC1 system, but it will still likely be more involved than just a preferred food system would be.  It could be as simple as the player, when they hold control over a food - where it right now shows the player's relative opinion of the flavor - it would instead have two components for each flavor.  First would be the absolute flavor area of the food.   Second would be what that player things of that flavor.  

 

So it might show saltiness as "Extremely".  That will be followed by one of a few player preferences for that point.  Perhaps "meh, ok, good, excellent! woah!, and yikes!   Or something like that.  The player knows that meh is far below preferred, ok is getting closer, good even closer, and excellent is almost exact.  woah is too high, and yikes is way too high.   So what you get is a uniform taste profile scale, and a uniform player preference scale.  And it's just a matter of aligning the two.   I think this would be easy for even new players to grasp.  If they still have trouble just make it explicit: "way too little" "not enough" good, excellent, "too much" and "way too much". 

 

PREFERRED FOOD

I think preferred food could also be a thing, providing a further satiation bonus for the player perhaps.  But my concern is, will the player have only 1, or a few?  Personally I'd junk any character that had fish as a preferred food (if it could be found out early on).  I was kind of hoping that maybe in TFC2 crops would have a more geographically varied distribution, since it will have distinct whole-island climates with different weather and everything.  If I had one preferred food in the tropics, and I didn't want to be there, it'd be a bit disappointing.  Though not the end of the world.   It might also be rolled into the prepped food, as a sort of further tier above task. 

 

I'll probably post more thoughts at a later date.  But these are my immediate thoughts.

Edited by Darmo
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@micmastodon The preservation mechanics would become more important. Instead of constantly micromanaging the decay, you would just throw the food in a -insert applicable preservation mechanic- and forget about it until you need food. Obviously this means that we need new and better ways to manage preservation. It's important to try and not think about tfc1 mechanics when we're discussing overhauls of this nature. We're not limited by what blocks are and aren't in tfc1. One of the things that I plan to do to make sure that there is always some kind of food around is to have some renewing resources such as clams or muscles on beaches and seaweed that replenishes. That way if you DO end up in a situation where all of your food has decayed, you have a way to survive until you can get back on your feet.

 

@Darmo The proposed changes would chose the lowest timer between two stacks when you merge a stack. Once the timer runs out, a single item from the stack is lost. This is actually balanced very well and means that it is always more efficient to store food in maximum stacks than to split them up over multiple stacks. There is no downside to this method and it means that players can't average stacks in perpetuity. My example of 5 minutes for berries or 2 hours for eggs is of course just an example and would need to be balanced. That said, it should be far easier to balance simple timers than it was to balance the complicated decay algorithm.

 

As far as taste, what you're proposing doubles the complexity of taste by trying to cram twice as much information into the same space (which most ppl didn't understand anyways) AND it more or less nullifies the bonuses that master chefs received in tfc1. If you had access to descriptors that give you nearly exact numbers, then there would be no point to leveling up the cooking skill since that is exactly what higher level chefs are able to attain. Their cooking skill then translated to the resulting meal which meant that other players could tell the chef the exact details that you are proposing that ALL players should get. In my opinion, it pretty much just cheapens the cooking profession. Why would we need a dedicated chef if at novice level, I can already understand all of the pertinent information about the ingredients? The information being provided to the player from a relative perspective was, and still is in my opinion, the only way to approach personal taste as we attempted it in tfc1.

 

That said, It occurs to me that trying to put numbers on what is to most ppl a vague idea in the first place(taste), is the fundamental problem. I think that there may not be any good way to convey personalized tastebuds in quite the way that we attempted it. I'm proud that we tried it. If you understood how it all worked and how much detail we went into, I think you'd agree that it was pretty cool. BUT I also know that I need to come at it from a new direction in order for it to be more accessible.

 

I've been pondering on ways to allow player preferences to remain in tfc2 beyond a simple "I like apples but not oranges" approach. My latest thought is to have a 0-5 rating assigned to all food. 0 means you hate it and 5 means you love it. Then as another layer, we make the preparation method modify this +-1 point. Example: You like cabbage 3, but you make a soup base from cabbage and this gives a +1 to cabbage for you. More detail needs to be thought out but I think this would potentially allow the player to continue to have their own distinct taste for food with a much easier to understand wrapping.

 

As always, I'm open to critique here.

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Ah, that makes sense on the decay mechanic.

 

As far as taste, it's true it's twice the information, but I think that the information will be more readily understandable, as it would describe the taste of the food in an absolute sense, and then how the player feels about that.  Rather than trying to make the player decipher both those features from one descriptor.   I was still proposing the descriptors start vague, and get more precise as skill levels up.    I guess when you were talking about a 'preferred food' system I thought this would also basically nullify the cooking trade, as I was understanding it to just mean the player tasted a given food once, and found out if they liked it or not.  If there was still going to be a taste component, I did not pick up on that.  I thought I was actually proposing a way to save some of that system, and the associated skill benefits. 

 

I had intended to come back and make a few more suggestions, regarding skill dictating what dishes you can make, and a brief re-hash of my spice suggestions from the old thread.  Plus maybe a stamina bar as another thing that food could benefit (regens faster the better food you've been eating) - although I'm sure stamina was suggested quite a lot on the old suggestion forum.  TFC2 now though, right?

 

0-5 SCALE

But ok, so 0-5 preference for each base food.  How is this conveyed to the player?  A verbal description, or actual number?   Do they have to try the food at least once?  Do they get a text echo on the screen?  That seems like it would get super-annoying.  Separate inventory tab that lists all the food they've tried, and how they feel about each one?  Or maybe it's just a tooltip.  They wouldn't have to actually try the food for a tooltip, but they'd have to have it in hand, which is probably good enough, and probably simplifies coding vs tracking if they've tried each food.  But really, this suggestion is just numbered taste, simplified to a much smaller scale, but over all food items.  And I'm not seeing how the cooking skill plays into this early part.

 

Skill could still play a part in food prep though, which is probably more logical to most people anyway.  Either a hard limit on what dishes you can make at what skill level, or a minigame that gets easier with higher skill.   The overall dish taste could be averaged over the ingredients, or take the higher (most liked), or use a grand total of all ingredients.   A grand total might allow for more flexibility.  For instance the player's skill could add a bit to the total when making the dish.   There could also be spices, and maybe the player has a preferred spice which can add to the total. 

 

There's more complexity that could be added, though I'm not sure if that's desired.  The player could move beyond salads and sandwiches, to making actual meals - fry eggs, fry bacon, make pancakes, combine them on a plate.  Spit-roast you have to baste every so often.  Stew where you add certain ingredients at certain times.  That sort of thing.  Fast-spoiling but highly beneficial.  Is it desired to have new process blocks and tools, like an oven (there could be a really fun wood stove GUI), cauldron, or frying pans?  Tea/coffee?  It does seem like the limitation is largely benefits.  To have very much complexity and/or greater difficulty, the benefits need to increase commensurately. 

 

BENEFITS

So what is out list of benefits currently?

-  Speed - certain dishes are eaten instantly, as opposed to bite-by-bite

-  Satiation - extra hunger bars filled beyond what the base ingredients would use

-  Nutrition - more complex dishes fill a little bit of all nutrition, even if they don't in fact contain those specific food groups

-  Delayed regeneration - per op, delayed health regeneration that kicks in if the player is damaged within a certain time period

 

Those could be mix-and-matched to a degree.  I'm not sure how far you could take it without getting op, or too complex.  But certainly more than two dishes I would think.  Mix in spoilage time and there could be more powerful/complex dishes that spoil faster.  Some that are filling, keep well, but don't provide satiation, etc.   I would think we'd want to avoid too many magical effects from food.  The "well-fed" bonus does seem like it could be compelling, if it increases player walking-speed/carry-weight/mining-speed (mostly mining speed imho).  

If a stamina bar were added, it could be another significant benefit (plus alcohol, tea, and coffee could affect it directly).  I've also been preparing a stat point suggestion for a new thread, though I probably won't have time to post it this weekend (out of town), and that could be tied in as well (may as well stop me here if you don't want to read that).

 

Overall I'm curious if the desire is mainly to clarify the system but keep it about at the complexity level it's at now in terms of items involved, or to expand the skill into a more complex thing, with process blocks of its own, closer to a full-on trade (though I doubt it'll ever really reach that status).

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I think the taste idea as is presented in the mod derives from a wrong assumption that has been made common now a days. "If you at first do not like something you do not need to ever eat again". This is actually one of the roots of the obesity epidemic we now see in our society. It takes 15 tries for the taste to develop in a young child. Also we all love the food we got used to eat as a child. That's the reason I enjoy a real meal made of rice, beans, salad, vegetables and some meat. Do not care much for hot dogs, hamburgers or tacos, as I was not used to eat junk food growing up. The whole concept of taste is so subjective and in some cases totally impossible to understand. There is also the question of high quality good food. that could be a chef food or just that special grandma dish that the whole family loves. In some cultures, like in France, when raising kids they have a tradition that the child must always have at least a bite of everything on the table. After a while they learn to appreciate the food. The conclusion is that taste is a learned thing, not something inborn. We are not born hating onions, it was the lack of proper care from the parents that made you like that. A properly educated person will actually love to eat vegetables and fruits, and will strive to have a balance diet.

Now this is a game after all and people just want to be able to make in the game the same kind of food they like in real life. that means lots of junk food.

Not really sure how to address all those variables in a game, actually do not think it should be attempted. 

The 50's and 60"s generation were very repressive, in contrast their kids grow up to be too liberal in their kids education. The result was that now a days kids are allowed everything. "Oh the baby does not like broccoli? He does not need to eat it. He loves mac and cheese? Let him eat that every day." Anyone with half a brain should be able to realize that this is not healthy.

Hence my constant bickering that we should address nutrition and not taste. Nutrition has actual consequences to you health. 

The today's concept of taste is a misconception created by a generation that grow with a terrible diet of fat and high fructose.

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That's all well and good, but I'd assume the player is an adult when they start the game.  So they have tastes generated over the life they had before being stranded or whatever.  Moreover, taste provides an easy logic-gate to having individually seeded experiences.   Nutrition, from a logic standpoint, is much more cut and dry.  It's true that different people can have different dietary needs, but TFC does not having blood tests and stuff.  So how are they to divine what they need?  The food groups aspect is simple and serves the nutrition aspect well.  And I also like your suggestion from the other thread Tony, of having a separate system of requirements to get hp *above* 1000.  Maybe through 'vitamins' or something.  I thought that might be a good way to incorporate higher tier dishes.

It's not like it has to be either/or.   Both things can be involved in the system.   I think personalized taste is much more accessible and easy to understand, for the part of the system that requires some figuring out on the player's part.  We can have more complexity as things progress:

 

FOOD TIERS

Tier 0 food - raw foods

- spoilage can be very fast to slow

- provides NO satiation

- meets basic food groups for hp up to 1000

- does NOT meet vitamin groups for hp above 1000

- slow to eat

 

Tier 1 food - simple combos like salads, sandwiches

- Spoilage is faster for the most part

- provides satiation, in response to more closely meeting player taste

- meets basic food groups for hp up to 1000

- does NOT meet vitamin groups for hp above 1000

- normal or fast to eat

 

Tier 2 food - cooked dishes requiring specific portable tools (frying pan, kettle) - includes hot drinks, omelets, flapjacks, spit roast

- Spoilage faster for the most part

- can make durable foods with no vitamins or satiation

- provides satiation, in response to more closely meeting player taste

- meets basic food groups for hp up to 1000

- meets vitamin groups for hp above 1000

- normal or fast to eat

 

Tier 3 food - cooked dishes requiring non-portable process blocks, and tools (Cauldron or oven in combination with frying pans, baking pans).  Includes casseroles and other things that take a long time.  Perhaps combination metals (or those could be in an even higher tier). 

- spoilage very fast

- can make very durable foods that provide some satiation and vitamins

- provides super-satiation*, in addition to normal satiation

- meet basic food groups with higher bonus for hp up to 1000

- meets vitamin groups with higher bonus for hp above 1000

- normal eat speed only

 

* - super-satiation would be another hunger bar that overlaps the normal one, in a different color.  Once this bar is depleted the player goes through the normal hunger bar.  Only high tier foods can fill into the super-satiation bar.  Once into the super-satiation bar, the player cannot eat any more.  This will incentivize eating lower tier food first, to get close to max on first bar, and then eating the tier 3 meal.  This could conveniently simulate a multi-course meal, sort of.

 

Stamina bar and/or stat points, if added, could further be affected, stat points would perhaps be tier 4 or above foods only.

 

LIMITED EATING

Furthermore, things could be complicated by limiting how fast the player can eat.  Basically you take the tier 0 food, and limit the player to only being able to eat enough to slowly progress.  So to use arbitrary number examples because I don't know the real numbers, say tier 0 raw food restores 4 fullness per piece eaten (I'm using the new system of discreet pieces, rather than oz).  The max 'fullness' bar is 50.   But the player's 'stomach' (this does not have a hud meter) only holds 5 pieces of food.  So they can only eat 5 pieces at a time, filling their fullness by 20 and stomach by 5, then they have to wait.   Say their stomach goes down at 1 piece per hour, while their overall fullness goes down 2 per hour.  So they eat 5 pieces, and in 5 hours they can eat their fill of again, but their overall fullness has gone down 10 in the meantime, so they only made 10 progress in the fullness bar during that 5 hours.  In this way, if your hunger gets extremely low, you cannot just fill it immediately by eating raw tier 0 foods.  If you almost starve, it will take you 20 hours to fill your hunger bar again with tier 0 food no matter what, because the stomach limitation means you can only make 10 fullness progress per 5 hours.  However higher tier foods give more satiation, filling up the fullness bar more for the same pieces, so with good enough food you can fill your fullness up in one sitting.   

There's a little danger here in naming, in that tracking the stomach fullness separately from the other bar (probably referred to as hunger by most) may seem counterintuitive or weird - like saying the player has two separate stomachs.  It may be better to try to call the overall bar a 'nourishment' bar or something.  Hopefully that can be arranged so as not to offend peoples' sense of logic.

 

This provides yet another marked difference between food tiers, just in terms of convenience and fullness.  depending on the number spread, it may allow the cooking skill to straight up add satiation to the food.  This would be especially good if we go with a simplified system where the skill isn't going to provide useful information.      If we have several food tiers, I would suggest that a given tier only contributes to a certain skill ceiling.  So tier 1 food only helps advance the novice skill.  Tier 2 foods can advance the novice skill level, or the next level if that's where the player is.  And so on.

Edited by Darmo
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I think everyone is misunderstanding me. I am not saying that taste does not exist, I just think of it as the way I was educated as a preference. Like when ordering my steak I prefer it median rare others might prefer well done, and that is perfectly fine.

As far as nutrition goes there is no need for anyone to do blood test to find out that everyone should have a balanced diet, and that is the way to be healthier. 

The point for me is that we already have all those different foods in the game. They are already there, nothing to add. My problem is for the player to be able to find a perfect sandwich and be able to eat that and only that forever with no consequences for the health.

So my point is like this if you prefer your meat rare or well done you should still eat poultry and fish to be healthy.

If you prefer your vegetables well cooked or raw you still have to eat a variety of then and not just one and the same everyday.

Liking your bread dark or light is perfectly fine as long as you are eating more than one type of grain.

With so many fruits to choose from you tell me you can't vary your diet?

Even with dairy, we could have other kinds of cheese and yogurt and creams and fresh milk. 

So taste for me is how you spice your food and prepare it. 

Right now we don't have pizza, but suppose we had if a player eats pepperoni pizza and only pepperoni pizza day after day I would expect at least that he would get fat and not so healthy. Instead the game rewards the player as long as that pizza (read sandwich ) has a perfect taste the player over time will be able to get all the way to 3000 points of health.

My proposition is very simple. We keep taste in the game, but just so far as a satisfaction mechanic, so the player would be able to eat more and take longer to be hungry.

The player need to eat at least 3 different foods from each food group to be able to get to the 3000 points of health.

We use the xp points for something else, don't really care much about that aspect, make it like MANA in a magic system or for enchantments the way it is in Vanilla Minecraft.

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I like the sound of that Darmo.

 

This is how I understand it: Nutrients would be your body's overall health. Hunger is how much you can eat at this moment. Nourishment is more like how hunger works now, where it drains faster with more activity, healing, etc, but can only be restored so much at a time. This is where more complicated meals come in handy since they allow faster replenishment of nourishment than eating raw food. 

 

A side effect of this should be to allow players with full nourishment to go a bit longer between eating than they would've been able to in tfc1 assuming that they are sitting idle.. Which is probably a good thing.

 

After further thought. Some sort of player preferences will have to wait until I can find a system that really works. I don't want to shoehorn something in that doesn't work well. For now, I'll just concentrate on the above mechanics.

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I am glad that was understandable despite my inconsistent descriptor use.    After thinking on it a bit, I said that the stomach - hunger as we're calling it now - wouldn't need a meter but after considering, that may not be a good idea.   In my example the player was eating discreet pieces, but higher tier foods might count as multiple pieces in one meal.  So it may be good for the player to have some idea where their hunger is.  Or they could just know by a text echo of 'you're full'.   But, if the hunger number spread is small, rather than a bar it could be a small icon at the left end of the nourishment bar.  Maybe in the shape of a tiny stomach, ala Don't Starve.  Or just a circle that gets progressively bigger as the character gets fuller.  Either way the nourishment and water bars might have to scoot to the right in order for such an icon to be big enough to be useful. 

Alternatively, the bar could change color.  Darker green for empty, light bright green for full.  Just a couple thoughts to try to save having another entire bar, but still have some indicator for the player.

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Slightly off topic, but color changes as indicators generally aren't a very good idea because it makes things very difficult for players who are color blind.

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Slightly off topic, but color changes as indicators generally aren't a very good idea because it makes things very difficult for players who are color blind.

This is true. I get bitched at whenever I create new color coded things. Stupid colorblind mutants! :angry:

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But there's no brightness color blind... What Darmo suggested can still be used even by B/W color blind people.

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And yet there would be complaints. Shades of colors are an issue. I have an idea in mind to get around this however. We'll see once I get to that point.

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Hi,

 

What about : Taste & Sanity

 

Introduce Sanity level could be good thing.

Explain : You are alone and you are always eating the same thing, really? Bad day with your gold pan, and f*** food (imagine highschool day + school food).

Eating good things you like make your sanity goes well and eating something your character dislike down your sanity.

example : Your character dislike brocolies, and when you eat it you're sanity down. So you'll search if possible another vegetable etc.

When you're sanity is higher than a level (like 700 of 1000, it's just an example) you get buff, and lower than 250 you got debuff. between 251 and 699 all it's normal.

 

Note : Sanity could be affected by other thing like weather, creature, biome... but sanity suggestion should need a full topic, and i'm not english, it's little hard to translate my original opinion =S

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This may or not be useful, but an observation I was making as I was snacking one day...

 

Generally, I find that I like snacking on salty crispy foods, like chips. But I can only munch on that for so long before I get in a mood for something else, usually something sweet, like chocolate.  I switch to that briefly (it doesn't take much to satiate that 'mood') and then move on to something else.

 

I've noticed I get that way a bit when eating regular meals as well.  A trip to a fast food joint, for example, is one of the rare times I will drink soda (I almost always drink water otherwise). The burger (a savory) puts me in the mood for fries (a salt) which then puts me in the mood for the soda (a sweet) and the cycle continues. It made me wonder if perhaps these taste moods were something studied in their labs to emotionally entice customers to eat there, but it also made me think about TerraFirmaCraft.

 

I wonder if, perhaps, one could implement a couple of "sit down" objects (dining table, picnic blanket) where one can open a "Meal UI" to slot a few different foods. The goal of this UI would be to slot a few different foods to create a balanced set of tastes to improve some attribute, say a "Meal Satisfaction" that provides a pool of regeneration for X number of minutes.

 

It struck me as being a bit more logical than TFC1's "sandwich" making, which I always found a bit odd -- A sandwich made of beef, carrot, seaweed, and cherries, for example, which strikes me as a terrible combination IRL, might be considered good to the player's avatar due to RNG. That could easily be my not understanding the TFC1 system well, though.

 

While the core might be similar (you're still combining ingredients), the time spent relaxing over a meal could provide more benefit than just eating on the run. And who knows, maybe if you're feeling fancy, you could expand this into a multiple-course meal. ;)

 

It may not be relevant or useful to the direction for food for TFC2, but it's something that was rolling around in my head all the same.  So do with that what you will. :)

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In real life, one of the most bonding social situations is the act of eating together. It's the reason for the Family and Friends Barbecue, The Dinners, The Thanksgiving Dinner. The take your date to a fancy restaurant.

In primitive societies the meals were always communal. When the hunters came back with meat it was always a feast.

I envision a system where the Town cook can prepare a feast and invite all players in the town for the banquet.

On special occasions the  server could also make those and invite all players to commemorate.

To achieve this we would need a few things:

First a reward for the player, eating in a feast could for example double your hunger bar so it would take longer to deplete. The effect should last for a limited amount of time, lets say 10 days.

The eating meal UI would be a nice addition too. 

The other important aspect would be the possibility to create perfect cooked and seasoned meals without caring for personal preferences.So no matter which players show up the food will be delicious.

The food should not be easy to make, since is a good reward, it would need special ingredients and carefully cooked to perfection.   

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For the taste system I think we can base on the model of tfc. However, there should be just an indication: how good is the food. Something simple, but that includes all de ranks since the first moment. A food is very bad, bad, good, very good... The raw food should be kept in the range of horrorific to bad. Cooked food will have a better range.

With this system you can make basic differentiations: I like rutabanaga more than onions and venisom more than lamb. Now it's time to start cooking. Obviously, Venisom with rutabanga will be tastier than lamb in onion sauce. This way we have a realy simple way of creating more advanced food, just relying on trying and failing.

 

However, here is where the interesting thing comes, when we reach a certain cooking level, we unlock the information we have in tfc in cooking skill "Adept". This way, a "professional" cooker won't be just trying and trying, but could focus in the "science" behind the scenes, to create food which will be more enjoyed.

 

As for the taste profile, I think it should be generated randomly by world and then each player will have small variations from that profile. This way,in multiplayer worlds, cookers can more or less know what their customers will want.

 

One more thing I would like to add is the possibility of creating "meals that hate each other". For example, I love chocolate. And I love venisom. But Venisom with chocolate must be horriying. This may be however, a little bit too confusing.

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All I really want to have in TFC2 is more cooking. Sandwitch and salad is not enough variety, I'd introduce cooking pot, you place on campfire, that requires you to make large batches of food at once from which you can dispence cooked dish to bottles/bowls/jars. Different dishes need different main/base ingridient and 3 slots for fillers, also during cooking player is required to tend the dish they are cooking from-time-to-time to not burn it. It'd give ability to make:

- stews - protein based, uses less water than soup 500mB/320oz, needs second to last attention,

- soups - veggie/fruit based, use most water out of 4; 1000mB/320oz, but pretty much cook by themslef

- creams - milk based; uses no water, very easy to burn, cooks quickest, but has increased decay rate compared to other food,

- jams - dedicated to fruit, have to use 3x as much sugar as fruit is used, takes 500mB of water per 320oz of output and has 90% decreased decay rate, but cooks longest; whole in-game day; and has to be tend most often. Jams can be used as fruit in rest of pot dishes, salads and sandwitches.

Maybe with ability to brew some (flavoured?) tea and coffee in pot.

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