The mono diet

jasonrohrer · 2018-06-06 15:24:58

People have claimed that no matter how well I balance the food sources, one food will always rise to the top as the most optimal food choice, given the limitations on resources that people are facing. It was carrots, then sheep meat, then popcorn, now berries.

As I go about adding more farmable foods this week, I'm struck by the question: but why would anyone eat this?

I'm about to add burritos to the game (after you grow beans and lime the corn to make masa harina for tortillas), but why would anyone eat them? "Out of boredom" isn't a great answer. I could make them better than any existing food source, and then they'd become THE food source for a while, until I introduce yet another better food source later, and we're into the classic power-inflation thing that a lot of games face when new content is added. The old food sources become worthless.

I could make them all require different resources to grow, so you'd have to switch foods as various resources run out, but that's also a design headache of a different variety. How many different resources can be required to grow something? Or maybe they are cooking ingredients, like goose fat to make pie crust, and lime to make tortillas. But balancing how those things run out is going to be a nightmare, and then after all the higher-food ingredients run out, people are still back to eating raw foods. Might as well have been eating raw foods the whole time, right? Well, except that they use water less efficiently.

But in real life, there's another reason that we don't just mono-feast on carrots, and that's nutrition.

A bunch of people have requested a nutrition model in this game, and I've resisted building one. It's fiddly, it's beyond the scope of this coarse simulation, it's hard to message. I've seen games that do it, and I never like it. Heck, my second game had one back in 2005, and I didn't like it in my own game.

Maybe there's a cheap substitute, though....

What if eating the same food over and over reduces how filling that food is for you? Like, you just get sick of it. That first carrot is DEEE-LISH-US, but that 99th carrot is making you feel green around the gills. You can hardly eat it. Ugg.

Remember Tom Hanks in Castaway, the first time he cooked a crab. "Oh boy! Crab! You gotta love crab!" Four months later... more crab...

This could also motivate spices and other things. You're getting sick of burritos, and then you craft hot sauce and give them a new lease on life, for a while at least.

I guess this would be implemented with a list of foods eaten, server-side, and some way the food value is decremented each time you eat the food, and then incremented again each time you eat some other food.

I'm imagining this being a slow process... maybe decrementing one calorie for every 5 or 10 times the food is eaten in sequence.

There are problems with messaging here, but I think it would be okay if it just kinda crept up on you over time, and you started to notice that these carrots aren't working so well anymore.

Anshin · 2018-06-06 15:49:07

Make crop types dependent on environment. That way Eves have more choice over where to start camp, and you get different foods arising from that choice.

Seal meat and pemmican are great if that's what's available in the arctic ... but you dream of burritos ....

EDIT: It would make different lives actually different, rather than trying to force people to have to do everything in one life.

Last edited by Anshin (2018-06-06 15:52:02)

Potjeh · 2018-06-06 15:54:00

IMO a buff rather than a penalty would be better. How about a slight decrease to hunger drain rate for the first item of any new food you eat within a life? All stacking and lasting until death. It could be a great way to have gourmet food which has poor calorie/effort ratio so you only cook it for the buff rather than nutrition. We could have all sorts of stuff like cakes and caviar and whatnot, and they'd all have a niche even though they do the same thing.

highjax · 2018-06-06 16:02:45

If you have preform extra work you should get extra stuff, or it should make it easier in the long run. Eaither another item drop needed for something else, or perhaps you don't have to replant or something similar where after you put in all that work you get an extra something after that.

Anshin · 2018-06-06 16:10:43

I can see penalties or buffs becoming a HUGE murder problem. Imagine the guy with a knife killing the baker for making "too many" carrot-rabbit pies. The farmer with an arrow pointed at his head if he doesn't plant crops to the demands of the murderer.

pein · 2018-06-06 16:13:37

nobody would realize you changed stuff

i dont think it would work

aowen · 2018-06-06 16:49:39

Let's see if we can break down the motivations.

Players mono diet because
- that food is superior (either because it IS superior, or it is perceived to be superior)
- that food is available where they are located (or they can migrate to a place with the favored food)

So, what can we change? We can balance the foods so none of them are outright superior, but that doesn't change player's perception. Often in games with metas (like this one), experienced players favor a certain crop over others, and most less experienced players follow suit ("you must be right, you've played longer than me").

So what about availability? If we look historically, people in Old World Europe weren't growing corn, because it didn't exist. But corn is heavily favored in the modern day.
What if player's couldn't favor 1 crop, because of their geography?
Experienced Eve's will attempt to migrate, but at a certain point they have to settle down.

This suggestion has a ton of more implications, more than I can enumerate right now. I'm hoping it serves as food for thought. : )

thirdplanet · 2018-06-06 16:50:07

the reason to eat different foods is that they provide different things... pie is labor intensive, but its portable and concentrated so you can bring it with you on a journey. if I'm just hanging out in camp, no way I'm wasting my pie -- berries/popcorn are camp food, because they are stationary.

Assuming burritos are multiple-bite and portable, they might supplant pies. But, pies are still important bc they sink threshed wheat. Basically, every food source is useful in its own way right now -- what niche would burritos fill?

jasonrohrer · 2018-06-06 16:51:24

Oh, I think they'd realize.

They'd eat that 99th carrot and see their hunger bar only go up one unit. WTF.

There's a thing in real life called Rabbit Starvation:

The groups that depend on the blubber animals are the most fortunate in the hunting way of life, for they never suffer from fat-hunger. This trouble is worst, so far as North America is concerned, among those forest Indians who depend at times on rabbits, the leanest animal in the North, and who develop the extreme fat-hunger known as rabbit-starvation. Rabbit eaters, if they have no fat from another source—beaver, moose, fish—will develop diarrhea in about a week, with headache, lassitude and vague discomfort. If there are enough rabbits, the people eat till their stomachs are distended; but no matter how much they eat they feel unsatisfied. Some think a man will die sooner if he eats continually of fat-free meat than if he eats nothing, but this is a belief on which sufficient evidence for a decision has not been gathered in the North. Deaths from rabbit-starvation, or from the eating of other skinny meat, are rare; for everyone understands the principle, and any possible preventive steps are naturally taken.
--Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson

You could imagine the same thing with mono carrots, where players "eat till their stomachs are distended; but no matter how much they eat they feel unsatisfied."

I just ate the whole damn carrot farm, and I'm still hangry!

In general, I'm always trying to devise the simplest way to accomplish what I'm trying to accomplish.

Having different foods grow in different places is complicated to design and implement, and it might not accomplish the desired goal anyway (wouldn't people attempt to settle where the optimal food grows?)

The idea of having it vary by life/person instead of over a lifetime is interesting. Like you're born with a kind of randomized "nutrition makeup" that you attempt to satisfy by trying different foods. There's this guy in the village who is just obsessed with figs and grows nothing but figs. I don't know what his deal is, because I've tried figs, and they're not that great.

But it seems like a weird puzzle to be solving in each life (taste-testing each food), and you'd be solving it through trial and error.

If the nutrition profile results from player actions in a given life, it's easier to understand and manage. I think arguments over what to grow are interesting. They're already happening, but are being argued with math. Having them be a matter of taste that varies from person to person based on their life experience so far (my mother raised carrots and I'm sick of them, but your mother raised sheep, and you're eager to try carrots) seems like a richer story.

BlackPaladin · 2018-06-06 16:53:17

Ever since the most recent update I found that the "mono diet" isn't actually a thing. The thing is, berries give the least pips of all food sources currently, and so are great for kids and elders, which is in fact 1/3 of your life. It's also a good source to fill up if you're missing a few pips before going out on a long journey too, albeit you really should focus on pies as an adult. Pies are still king, and carrying one around with you is still best during your adult life.

Since the most recent update I've finally started seeing a lot more developed towns again. Yes, berries are a great food source, but the real reason behind a ton of berries is you need it for both compost and to feed sheep. Berries are extremely important in this matter, especially since now compost is required quickly since soil is needed for all other crops. While you can feed a whole town using berries, it sucks up your water (which in larger towns I find isn't as plentiful after 15+ generations), and also reduces your ability to advance and grow as compost isn't able to be made as frequently, and sheep aren't able to be fed as frequently.

Right now carrots are ONLY really used for sheep, compost, and pies, which is honestly what they should be used for considering a few updates ago I've met a lot of people complaining about eating carrots raw, that you should to save for pies. I've seen large towns begin to fail during my own generation due to people only focusing on berries and ending up using up all the well water. They travel farther for water and there ends up only being a couple more ponds even left that can be turned into wells.

With how the game is designed you can't simply look at it as a generation by generation type deal, but rather, the culmination of all generations together. Water is something that begins to actually dry up after a multitude of generations use it up, and then they are resorting on refill rates. This makes it so berries after so many generations can only be supported based on the amount of ponds within the area you can build wells on. Eventually, you can't support an endless berry field. You need to focus on advancing to better food sources like popcorn, pies, and hopefully other foods in the future. Berries being cheap is required to allow this to exist. They're a bad food source in the long run but good for the younger and older folks of your generation due to their low food amount.

Now, while popcorn is actually better because it has more "eats" and also provides a lower food amount each time so it's good for kids + elders, it takes so long for dirt to become tilled again that often times corn is just not there for your generation to eat. That's where this berry problems really stems from. Other food sources are better, but because it takes an entire generation for soil to be able to be tilled again, it denies you access to it for most people. Like one town I was born into had literally over 50 rows of dirt, all being wormed for carrots and corn. I only saw it finally being able to be farmed later in my lifetime, and that's basically going to be used in the generation after me, not for me. That's not how a food should work.

Last edited by BlackPaladin (2018-06-06 16:55:07)

aowen · 2018-06-06 17:03:06

jasonrohrer wrote:

The idea of having it vary by life/person instead of over a lifetime is interesting. Like you're born with a kind of randomized "nutrition makeup" that you attempt to satisfy by trying different foods. There's this guy in the village who is just obsessed with figs and grows nothing but figs. I don't know what his deal is, because I've tried figs, and they're not that great.
But it seems like a weird puzzle to be solving in each life (taste-testing each food), and you'd be solving it through trial and error.

Yeah, I don't prefer this one, either.

A budding village needs to be able to coordinate to make it over the first generations. If there's disagreement over which foods to grow, which not a matter of opinion but of life and death, I think it would lead to a lot of disunity.

jasonrohrer wrote:

If the nutrition profile results from player actions in a given life, it's easier to understand and manage. I think arguments over what to grow are interesting. They're already happening, but are being argued with math. Having them be a matter of taste that varies from person to person based on their life experience so far (my mother raised carrots and I'm sick of them, but your mother raised sheep, and you're eager to try carrots) seems like a richer story.

I like this, because it (typically) means the whole village has to pivot, or the village splits into the "carrot eaters" and the "sheep herders", will people trading places on occasion.

jasonrohrer · 2018-06-06 17:08:21

The original idea was to have each food serve a niche, that's true.

But I think it's going to be harder and harder to really make that work as I add hundreds of foods.

Which pie do people currently eat? There are 8 types of pie. How does each fill a niche? Aren't one or two types favored, and the others pretty much never made?

Oh, yeah, Mutton pie, followed by Rabbit pie. Then Rabbit Carrot pie is about 3x less common. The other five pies are way less common than that, with plain old berry pie never getting made. There's no niche for it.

Potatoes are next, before burritos. They require 2x soil (rebury when growing) and must be cooked before eating (like a popcorn that can't be eaten raw). They can be reseeded without letting the row go to seed (one potato sprouts eyes and can plant a new row). They will obviously provide more food than carrots. But how much more food? I can tweak the numbers until they look good, but how do potatoes fill a niche?

And then I want to add parsnips, suppose. They are pretty much starchy carrots. Need to be cooked before eating. What is their niche?

Then I want to add turnips. Rutabagas. Spinach. Kale. Broccoli.

Cabbage is for sauerkraut, and you need to make a kraut board and crock, and find some salt. But WHY? What's the niche?

hihibanana · 2018-06-06 17:09:04

I think having certain foods grow in certain climates would be just enough complexity to shake up the mono diet. Berry bushes dry up in the desert, for example.

Edit: Interesting... foods having a niche. I think there won't really be a niche unless we look at accessibility. Which foods are easy to make right now? It's less about the effect of consuming different foods at the moment, as they all have the same effect (replenishing the hunger bar).

Last edited by hihibanana (2018-06-06 17:35:17)

Alleria · 2018-06-06 17:13:56

Anshin wrote:

I can see penalties or buffs becoming a HUGE murder problem. Imagine the guy with a knife killing the baker for making "too many" carrot-rabbit pies. The farmer with an arrow pointed at his head if he doesn't plant crops to the demands of the murderer.

You shouldn't be making too many carrot-rabbit pies anyway... Most of the time, it's just a waste of a carrot. Since threshed wheat has no value, it's !!MUCH!! better to make a carrot pie and a rabbit pie seperately.

Currently there is no good reason to add more than 1 ingredient to a pie.

Anshin · 2018-06-06 17:43:05

Alleria wrote:

Anshin wrote:
I can see penalties or buffs becoming a HUGE murder problem. Imagine the guy with a knife killing the baker for making "too many" carrot-rabbit pies. The farmer with an arrow pointed at his head if he doesn't plant crops to the demands of the murderer.
You shouldn't be making too many carrot-rabbit pies anyway... Most of the time, it's just a waste of a carrot. Since threshed wheat has no value, it's !!MUCH!! better to make a carrot pie and a rabbit pie seperately.
Currently there is no good reason to add more than 1 ingredient to a pie.

That was a generic example. Replace "carrot-rabbit pies" with any food.

Potjeh · 2018-06-06 18:20:31

jasonrohrer wrote:

The idea of having it vary by life/person instead of over a lifetime is interesting. Like you're born with a kind of randomized "nutrition makeup" that you attempt to satisfy by trying different foods. There's this guy in the village who is just obsessed with figs and grows nothing but figs. I don't know what his deal is, because I've tried figs, and they're not that great.
But it seems like a weird puzzle to be solving in each life (taste-testing each food), and you'd be solving it through trial and error.
If the nutrition profile results from player actions in a given life, it's easier to understand and manage. I think arguments over what to grow are interesting. They're already happening, but are being argued with math. Having them be a matter of taste that varies from person to person based on their life experience so far (my mother raised carrots and I'm sick of them, but your mother raised sheep, and you're eager to try carrots) seems like a richer story.

If this is in reference to my suggestion, that's not what I had in mind. The idea is you get a bonus (whatever it is) whenever you eat any food type for the first time in your life. Play a "Mmmm" sound whenever this happens instead of the usual sound for that food, and it'll be obvious it's a good thing and players will try to replicate it. Shouldn't be too hard to figure out it triggers on new food.

Morti · 2018-06-06 18:24:00

jasonrohrer wrote:

...but how do potatoes fill a niche? What's the niche?

You have water, you have soil, you have time. Maybe it's not what the player gets from the food that you should be looking at, but what the food needs that you should be looking to expand on. People have already mentioned PNP, now, more often referred to as NPK; nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. But that is probably beyond what you want to add. I get that. So make adding ash from fires a thing, make adding legumes or clover a way to fix nitrogen (without specifically saying that), make adding bones required for phosphorous. Later you can make them mineable or found out in the open the way you're doing with iron, alum or limestone, or just add them findable off the bat.

But that's not what I really wanted to hit on. There must be some other factors you can add to growing, add to the game, that can bring with it's own niches. Sunlight is the first thing that comes to mind, but , with the way biomes are scattered about, it wouldn't make much sense of some biomes had certain amounts of sunlight while others had less, with the way they are scattered about the map. Biomes have temperatures though, what about making the plants growth possible based on temperature ranges? Humidity is another thing that comes to mind. The landscape is flat, so you can't really add altitude, but you could simulate it somehow. Maybe the tundras could be some equivalent to high altitude and the deserts just the opposite?

None of those things in particular are what I want you to consider, but things like that, that can vary from place to place randomly, over large swaths of land the same way biomes do, or randomly throughout a biome , the way ponds or soil placement do. Maybe the greatest food in the game can only be generated based on some rare factor that is only as common as a gold vein or a monolith. Maybe it's based on some biological even that only occurs rarely; the equivalent of whale fall to seafloor, or a monsoon.

The environment determines what grows there, and what grows there determines what food chains exist, and what niches foods serve peoples diets around the world.

Maybe we got a swamp with more frogs, maybe they got a prairie with more chicken. Some things can be farmed, other things depend on the regeneration rate of the biome and the organisms in it. You already kinda do that with rabbits for pie. Have more factors come from the environment, either via living resources, or via inorganic ones (like the NPK) or some kind of natural events. You know, the way you made the apocalypse happen? Have something like that occur. Screen changes colors, goes dark, black out, then, the players are back in their world only to find a hurricane has passed through, the fields are flooded with water and certain crops have been devastated. Could do something similar for a server wide drought, like the dust bowl of the 1930's, or a snow storm...

I just have too many ideas on this stuff and I don't want to distract you from what you plan for the game, or take away from any one thing, by suggesting a thousand others along with it.

Natural disasters really sound fun though, but they're not really that related to food.

IAteABerry · 2018-06-06 18:29:06

jasonrohrer wrote:

... What if eating the same food over and over reduces how filling that food is for you? ...

I love it! It'd be fun to have to eat a "well balanced diet" just by eating and growing different stuff. It would also legitimize spices, elaborate cooking recipes, and trading food. It's fun and simple.

thirdplanet · 2018-06-06 18:41:41

one of the resources that creates each food-niche is time. since time is so limited and precious in game, its not always just a matter of math-ing out the calories for a maximally efficient diet, but also making good use of time. In my experience, that is what dictates which foods are used, not just calorie efficiency.

Say the trapper just got back to camp with a ton of rabbits, but we don't happen to have any threshed wheat lying around. Cooked rabbits aren't the most efficient, but hey we the resources for it, so we cook a bunch of rabbits to sustain us. Rather do that than starve while scrambling to get some wheat. Or say we have a ton of berry bushes and threshed wheat, but no free carrots or rabbits... the trapper is going to need pie to leave camp, so might as well make some berry pie. Even though these foods aren't the *optimum* use of resources by the numbers calorie-wise, they still get used because they are available and time is limited.

So factoring in the time required to produce crops versus the time that food products last creates new niches. Corn is pretty quick to grow in the scheme of things (seeds are easily accessible, especially once you've established a crop, doesn't erase soil, only needs one water), so it makes sense that the food output (popcorn) is minimally helpful. Still has its place in a camp (olds and babies) but it makes sense that it's not a huge time sink.

Carrots are more of a time sink (limited harvest window before it goes to seed), but they are necessary for a number of other things.

I think in adding new types of food, caloric density vs effort required is important to consider, as well as use in other recipes! Right now corn is only useful for popcorn, so it isn't a priority. Whereas carrots are super necessary for lots of things, so they have become valuable.

As you add new types of crops, adding recipes that they can be used in is the way to make them relevant. And making those processed food products have a variety of effects to consider: how filling they are, whether they are portable, whether they have multiple uses (density).

I wonder if you could introduce more types of effects from food besides just filling. You have that model in place with mushrooms. Maybe something like coffee gives you a speed boost? A burrito makes you strong (carry dug rocks faster)?

Last edited by thirdplanet (2018-06-06 18:43:01)

Spockulon · 2018-06-06 18:51:15

There are two thoughts along this topic that I want to offer:

1) Communal Food Sources - Someone on the forum mentioned stew and it got me thinking. In small communities/tribes it's not uncommon for meals to be shared among the community. They gather at the same time around the fire to bond over a meal.

I think this could work well in the game. It would bring players together, overt a communal food source. We already have so many ingredients in the game that would make stews or soups.

Here's how I picture this: Smith/Craft a large pot (iron/clay?). Pot must be placed over a fire and filled with water. When the water boils, ingredients can be added (carrots, onion, rabbit, mutton). Soup must be accessed by using a bowl. Meanwhile, the midwives/mothers have a place to gather and an opportunity to see others players more often.

2) Food Storage - Food storage is a bit difficult in game currently. It's not impossible. 3 pies to a basket, 4 baskets to a wooden box/cart/chest = 12 pies stored. But this is not nearly as efficient as it could be.

Food Storage has been a HUGE FACTOR in human history. We have invented multiple methods of food preservation hat do not require refrigeration. Throughout history we have built structure to store our food (like granaries), and kings have taxed their subjects in food.

We need some efficient form of storage. There would be more of a reason to continue farming after a village reaches "peak food". it would allow long-term planning and could help prevent famines in more developed villages.

Turnipseed · 2018-06-06 18:58:18

Food greifing is already a problem doing this would just make it easier for someone to eat all the food in town, and starve everyone.

Anshin · 2018-06-06 19:01:57

jasonrohrer wrote:

Cabbage is for sauerkraut, and you need to make a kraut board and crock, and find some salt. But WHY? What's the niche?

Niche= Awesome food. Because sauerkraut boiled for a couple hours with bacon, then eaten on rye toast, is fantastic.

IAteABerry · 2018-06-06 19:19:52

Turnipseed wrote:

Food greifing is already a problem doing this would just make it easier for someone to eat all the food in town, and starve everyone.

Griefer rats getting into the bean supply, or new players not understanding the "nutrition" mechanic, would be just another reason to diversify.

aowen · 2018-06-06 19:41:26

jasonrohrer wrote:

Potatoes are next, before burritos. They require 2x soil (rebury when growing) and must be cooked before eating (like a popcorn that can't be eaten raw). They can be reseeded without letting the row go to seed (one potato sprouts eyes and can plant a new row). They will obviously provide more food than carrots. But how much more food? I can tweak the numbers until they look good, but how do potatoes fill a niche?
And then I want to add parsnips, suppose. They are pretty much starchy carrots. Need to be cooked before eating. What is their niche?
Then I want to add turnips. Rutabagas. Spinach. Kale. Broccoli.
Cabbage is for sauerkraut, and you need to make a kraut board and crock, and find some salt. But WHY? What's the niche?

There is only 1 single reward for growing food in the game right now, which is satisfying hunger. I can think of 2 variables in terms of food reward: # of calories, and # of bites (pies being 4).

I think you're finding difficulty in there are aren't enough meaningful combinations of those 2 variables.

People are unlikely to regularly explore the food tree if they can learn a single food, and get skilled at making that food quickly, as long as that food satisfies hunger.

Another road you can start thinking of is "in what other ways can food be helpful?"

Some one-offs ideas:
- food that changes body temperature for a period of time
- food that makes you faster for a period of time
- food that lets you use more characters when speaking for a period of time ("makes you smarter", to empower children)

Spockulon · 2018-06-06 19:41:39

Anshin wrote:

jasonrohrer wrote:
Cabbage is for sauerkraut, and you need to make a kraut board and crock, and find some salt. But WHY? What's the niche?
Niche= Awesome food. Because sauerkraut boiled for a couple hours with bacon, then eaten on rye toast, is fantastic.

Maybe it's just this? We humans enjoy different foods, just for the simple joy of it. I'm sure this ties into the concept of palate fatigue, but our species is so easily captured by novelty, that sometimes we like something simply because it is new or different or our favorite.

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The mono diet

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