The mono diet

Turnipseed · 2018-06-06 19:50:52

IAteABerry wrote:

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.

I ment specifically for the diminishing rate of return on how much food something provides.

denriguez · 2018-06-06 19:55:48

Anshin wrote:

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.

Yes, I've said similar things to this in the past. There needs to be more variation between the biome--not just what occurs naturally there and how hot the biome is, but what you can (and can't) actually do there. To me it seems absurd to grow carrots in the arctic (not that anyone does currently) or berries in the desert, but beans, corn, and (eventually?) chiles should *thrive* in hotter climates. If you wanna build your town in a desert biome so everyone stays warmer? That's great, but you can't base your food on berries or carrots.

Or maybe just make things more expensive to grow in different biomes. Maybe growing berries in the desert is technically possible, but it'll cost you 2x water. Climate largely dictates cuisine IRL anyhow--why not mirror that?

YAHG · 2018-06-06 19:56:57

Maybe don't add hundreds of foods?

There plain old might not be a point.

Perhaps that is actually just a gimmick and cool complex crafting to make high tech shit is more fun way to get to 10k things.

Rebel · 2018-06-06 20:09:49

Spockulon wrote:

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.

had the same idea, you could have it act kinda like a "food well" where adding multiple different ingreds increase its food points and people can use a bowl to grab x amount from it.
and I have mentioned before about a barrel that acts the same way as the current wells were you fill it up with flour (EG, make flour in a bowl, put flour in a bucket, when its full, put in a barrel)

Also, on the to the topic of food storage and preservation, if different foods had different "Rot" speeds, EG berries rot really fast but higher tech food like pie rot slower would give people more of a reason to make it. even if carrots lasted a little bit longer then berries meaning they were better for early game traveling people would probs grow them?
you could really play around with this, it would add value to different types of food. on another note, the game is about advancing the tech tree, if you give berries no recipes and corn loads then it would feel like progression, thus early game berries would be good but once the tech level where they are no longer the meta as higher tech food is available, something as simple as needing a certain tool to farm corn, where corn loads better than berries.

thirdplanet · 2018-06-06 20:26:00

aowen wrote:

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)

This!!!!!!!! This is absolutely the problem with trying to introduce more types of food given the current model of food usage. Food needs to do something besides just fill hunger bar.

Affecting body temp is great -- a few people have mentioned stew, stew is nice and hearty, could have the added benefit of warming you up!

And the increased number of combinations that comes from adding more food effects is cool too -- maybe hot peppers make you fast, but also max out your temp, so there's a utility trade off and they aren't just magic speed juice.

Spockulon · 2018-06-06 20:26:30

Rebel wrote:

Spockulon wrote:
. . .
had the same idea, you could have it act kinda like a "food well" where adding multiple different ingreds increase its food points and people can use a bowl to grab x amount from it.
and I have mentioned before about a barrel that acts the same way as the current wells were you fill it up with flour (EG, make flour in a bowl, put flour in a bucket, when its full, put in a barrel)
Also, on the to the topic of food storage and preservation, if different foods had different "Rot" speeds, EG berries rot really fast but higher tech food like pie rot slower would give people more of a reason to make it. even if carrots lasted a little bit longer then berries meaning they were better for early game traveling people would probs grow them?
you could really play around with this, it would add value to different types of food. on another note, the game is about advancing the tech tree, if you give berries no recipes and corn loads then it would feel like progression, thus early game berries would be good but once the tech level where they are no longer the meta as higher tech food is available, something as simple as needing a certain tool to farm corn, where corn loads better than berries.

Yes, that is how I picture it. Come to the soup pot with your bowl, say hi to a few fellow villagers, bond for a moment over food before returning to work (just like, IRL).

I like the idea of barrels for food storage. It would sure beat the heck out of having 4 bowls of flour laying around. It would make the baker's job quite a bit easier, and could even lead to a "supplier"-type job role in the community.

I also REALLY like the idea of rot speeds. Maybe the foods higher up the tech tree should receive this a bonus. Having the berries rot faster makes sense (just like IRL), where as carrots and corn would stay good for quite some time.

I know this would seem like another addition to the "decay" process, but I think it would stop people from spam-picking berries and leaving them all over the place.

Maybe if the food is stored in a barrel the rate of decay is significantly decreased? Another great idea would be for the barrels to be immoveable while they contain food items, to reduce the potential for griefing.

Uncle Gus · 2018-06-06 20:33:01

If you did implement an actual reason to eat different foods, then it wouldn't matter if a lot of the foods were fundamentally the same but only visually different.

TrustyWay · 2018-06-06 20:33:16

Eating well made food, end tech food can make you speak more than your letter limit. Innovation comes with mind, mind can't do much if limited.

thirdplanet · 2018-06-06 20:34:33

As for cultivation of each type of food being too similar -- I think your model for rose cultivation was a cool idea! You could expand that more. It was really tough to manage, and requires a lot of communication.

happynova · 2018-06-06 21:26:06

I'm hesitant to even suggest this, because I think it would introduce some huge and potentially frustrating challenges, and I am emphatically not one of those people who think this game is boring because it's too easy.

But. It occurs to me that a big problem with monoculture in the real world is that it leaves you vulnerable to crop failure. If your entire civilization is dependent on growing potatoes, you are in serious trouble when potato blight ravishes through your crops, to use a not-at-all random example. So if what you want is to have a reason for people to diversify, some small but non-zero chance of crop diseases wiping out all or most of a particular crop would do it.

I suspect the more I think about this idea, the more I'm likely to hate it. But it would certainly be realistic.

InSpace · 2018-06-06 21:31:25

Add vegan food

Christoffer · 2018-06-06 22:37:31

A bonus for eating varied foods seems like a good idea. I have an alternative to keeping track of how many you have eaten of everything. Not sure it’s better, but it’s at least interesting:

A human needs a varied diet to grow up healthy. Remove certain building blocks, and people will become shorter or more often ill, shorter life span, etc. So imagine that ten of the hunger boxes are coded to ten different types of nutrition and the way to gain a hunger box is to consume a food item of that type. A diet of only carrots will yield an adult with fewer hunger boxes than one who has had a varied diet. People will live healthier lives when they get access to more food variation.

Glassius · 2018-06-06 22:43:39

I've just made a suggestion that may make this thread obsolete. It is complex, but a content for this topic in TLDR:

Make all raw food and simple, one ingredient meals inferior at start. You do not have to make filling decreasing with each eating.

Instead, give us many recipes for meals requiring a wide variety of ingredients. Allow them to fill much more than base ingredients sum. Make them eatable with low hunger fill per one bite/gulp, but give them more portions (like pies with 8 bites instead of 4).

This way, a mono diet, with simple, one ingredient snacks or even raw food would be inferior to multi ingredients cooking recipes

Uncle Gus · 2018-06-06 22:47:14

I'm reminded of Terrafirmacraft, which has a couple of mechanics in this area. First, food is divided into five groups: fruit, vegetable, grain, protein, dairy. Your max health is determined by how much of these food groups you have eaten, so if one or more of them is neglected, your overall health dimishes. I'm not sure that part of it is what we want here, but having major food groups might be easier than tracking individual foods.

The other mechanic is that ecah player has a random "tastes" profile. Food can be cooked or combined into different recipes etc. with each food/cookedness combination satisfying the different taste types of sweet, sour, salty, bitter and savoury. Eating food that aligns with your tastes gives more food bonus.

Again, not necessarily what we want in this game, but worth discussing for comparisons.

jasonrohrer · 2018-06-06 22:52:03

Yes, people eat different foods in real life just to do it (anyone living 100% on Soylent?... so yummy). But "taste" isn't a thing in the game. The only way foods are different aesthetically is the pictures. The mono-diet fatigue mechanic would be a way of simulating taste.

As much as people talk about loving role playing, I really don't believe it exists, long-term. I think the most interesting form of role playing isn't true role playing at all, but actually true-to-story behavior motivated by the realities of the game.

So while you might pretend to be sick of carrots and chase the in-game taco truck for novelty's sake once or twice, you won't keep doing that if there's no real reason to do it. Especially not if tacos are worse than carrots in any measurable way (time, soil, water, etc).

In real life, you don't pretend to be sick of carrots, you literally are sick of carrots, and if you keep eating them, you will die. You will drop everything and be able to think of nothing else when the taco truck rolls by.

I don't know that any food differentiation scheme can really motivate a truly diverse diet. We can add more cultivation variables (NPK, crop rotation, etc.), sure. We could add more food effect variables, sure. We can imagine that this complexity will create a variety of niches, but I worry that "surface" of this multi-variable space will simply have a few local minima that are easy to find.

Regarding regional growing conditions, aren't most people looking to start a village in one of a few biomes? Before desert, it was green areas near swamps. Also, why would you bother seeking out some far-off biome just to grow or trade some exotic food? If the food you are growing in your biome is sufficient, you can just mono-crop that. If it's happening smaller than biome-scale (like random patches of land that are good for berries, while other patches are good for carrots), then that becomes difficult to message and understand.

Disease spreading through a mono-crop is interesting.... somewhat hard for me to implement, and probably not the main reason that people grow/eat more that one thing.

Also, anything that only motivates more CROPS does not help motivate more food products beyond those crops. Why do you want three flavors of applesuace (cinnamon, cardamom, and plain)? Why do you want mashed potatoes instead of baked?

At some point, you should eat some berry pie. But look at the food log---no one is eating it, ever. I wasted my time adding berry pie to the game.

Berry pie is delicious, though...

TrustyWay · 2018-06-06 23:02:43

denriguez wrote:

Anshin wrote:
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.
Yes, I've said similar things to this in the past. There needs to be more variation between the biome--not just what occurs naturally there and how hot the biome is, but what you can (and can't) actually do there. To me it seems absurd to grow carrots in the arctic (not that anyone does currently) or berries in the desert, but beans, corn, and (eventually?) chiles should *thrive* in hotter climates. If you wanna build your town in a desert biome so everyone stays warmer? That's great, but you can't base your food on berries or carrots.
Or maybe just make things more expensive to grow in different biomes. Maybe growing berries in the desert is technically possible, but it'll cost you 2x water. Climate largely dictates cuisine IRL anyhow--why not mirror that?

That is something I thought interesting, mono diet shouldn't be about stats or how many thing you eat, it should be more instinctive : Depending of the biome you live in, foods grow differently. Population didn't choose to eat carrots or berry or corn, they had to because that had nothing else.

But for that Jason needs make biomes way way larger. People will have to adapt where they live and they will need items that comes from far away. As some vegetables don't grow in their lands, they will need the help of other population.

The other problem is basic ressource that we need to start settlements that only can be found in grassland. Straight & curve branches and threads. There should be subtitutes of them.

Last edited by TrustyWay (2018-06-06 23:08:01)

Potjeh · 2018-06-06 23:03:45

That's why variety bonus is great. Haven and Hearth is a food centered game too, only there you gain stats by eating. The higher your stats, the more food points you need to get the next increase, but each unique food eaten since the last stat gain the number of points is decreased by a percentage. In the early to mid game this means that most people strive to eat only one of each food between two stat gain events to maximize their efficiency, tho later it kinda fades away due to other broken mechanics (quality and tableware).

Lily · 2018-06-07 00:30:57

Some new options might be to introduce food decay. So you can have food that has extremely long life span. If a food isn't very filling but last 10 hours, when normal food decays in 1 hour, that is great for the specific niche of long term food storage. Another option might be having food with a ton of uses to it. For example a food might be really complex and difficult to make, say it takes the resources of making 3 pies, but it only provides 2 pies worth of food. Though it is divided out over 8 bites. Food wise it isn't as efficient, however travel wise it is more efficient. If you plan on traveling you want one of the new food in your pack instead of 3 pies, because you can carry other stuff in your pack as well. It saves space, and you could also carry 3 of them for a higher max food carried as well.

You can also make larger meals as well that provide a ton of food but can't be stored in backpack or anything. Like you make a turkey dinner with mash potatoes and gravy and corn and stuff. Maybe it has like 20 uses and each bite is like one of the better quality pies. That would be amazing for saving space or having like family dinner, and instead of one person carrying it around and eating it them self, you would have everyone sharing it. it is too much for one person, but ideal for a group.

So the first example I mention food being easier to carry in your backpack, and second example making it so it can't be used in backpack at all. Storage ability might also be a factor too. If say you could stack carrots into a pile up to like 20, then even if the carrots had reduced food value form now, the ability to save that much space would be amazing. So saving space can be a factor, just like having one huge item that takes up a lot of space but is super food dense is good too.

So factors to consider for food are, number of bites, food value per bite, food value total, difficulty to make, ratio of resources used to food value provided, longevity, ease of transport, ease of storage.

When you think about it, wild berries will probably always be used, simply because their difficulty to make is non-existent. You just grab them off a bush. Foods like popcorn are ideal for elderly and children due to many bites at low value, while pies are great for travel. Less effective foods that are easy to store, last longer than others, save space, or extra dense for travel will still be popular. Low tech people will probably want the most food per resources, because everyone starving but higher tech people will definitely go into those other food sources.

Go! Bwah! · 2018-06-07 02:47:51

YAHG wrote:

Maybe don't add hundreds of foods?
There plain old might not be a point.
Perhaps that is actually just a gimmick and cool complex crafting to make high tech shit is more fun way to get to 10k things.

+1

zennyrpg · 2018-06-07 03:12:27

Lily wrote:

You can also make larger meals as well that provide a ton of food but can't be stored in backpack or anything. Like you make a turkey dinner with mash potatoes and gravy and corn and stuff. Maybe it has like 20 uses and each bite is like one of the better quality pies. That would be amazing for saving space or having like family dinner, and instead of one person carrying it around and eating it them self, you would have everyone sharing it. it is too much for one person, but ideal for a group.

Imagine roasting a bear. I imagine it like a festival, everyone gathering around, stopping work and eating. Since all (or most) food should spoil or degrade there would be a limited time to "eat it while its hot."

Lily wrote:

So factors to consider for food are, number of bites, food value per bite, food value total, difficulty to make, ratio of resources used to food value provided, longevity, ease of transport, ease of storage.

I think berries are so powerful in part because they are 1) idiot proof as in require almost no maintenance 2) efficient on-bush storage.

You forgot to non-food uses. Berries make compost. So people will always grow them and munch them. Just like people munch carrots even if told not to.

---------

Personally I'd like to see per-life differentiation of food consumption. I think the easiest way to do that is via biomes. If people could live well in other biomes due to specialized crops that would make villages feel really unique. It would make each life feel really unique. But yeah, I don't know how to force people to live in "non-optimal" places.

aowen · 2018-06-07 03:21:46

I don't know what the specific goal here. Is it that all crops & recipes are made on a regular basis?

If that's the case, then I think that is an unrealistic design goal.
Look at any game that has content updates, and you'll find craftables/items/cards that aren't made/used/played regularly. A lot of time goes into content, but unfortunately some of it will be neglected.

Re-examining taste:
I believe simulating taste will encourage players to grow at least two different crops, but the meta could easily develop to "always corn and carrots". Recipes that involve those two crops will likely be made, but you could easily imagine other crops and recipes being neglected.

Other thoughts:
I think it's worth mentioning that many people neglect balanced diets, even today, when it's at its easiest achieve. Historically, Asian countries had a diet that was comprised of mostly fish and rice, the Irish lots of potatoes and bread.

Berry pie likely isn't made because of how important berries are for compost. As the only renewable way to get soil, I believe that outstrips the pie benefit.

At the end of the day, you can't make the players themselves hungry or get tried of certain foods. I think simulating taste is a step in the right direction, but I'm not convinced it's enough on its own.

Rebel · 2018-06-07 03:36:30

I only make berry pies when:

A. No Rabbits
B. need some travel food and there are no better pies in sight.

Rabbits are easy to catch, give fur and is better food. That being said, berry pies are better then no pies, I hate seeing loads of plates with dough on them waiting to the optimal stuffing, just make ANY pies even carrot! yes i said it, even carrot!

Last edited by Rebel (2018-06-07 03:36:45)

Glassius · 2018-06-07 10:18:02

Topic is going in the good direction. Hot meals cooling fast, more recipes giving better satiation, more bites per meal... Everything as I suggested

jasonrohrer wrote:

Disease spreading through a mono-crop is interesting.... somewhat hard for me to implement, and probably not the main reason that people grow/eat more that one thing.

And back to phantoms, bit this time aphids

Last edited by Glassius (2018-06-07 10:24:43)

iguane · 2018-06-07 11:33:24

Glassius wrote:

I've just made a suggestion that may make this thread obsolete. It is complex, but a content for this topic in TLDR:
Make all raw food and simple, one ingredient meals inferior at start. You do not have to make filling decreasing with each eating.
Instead, give us many recipes for meals requiring a wide variety of ingredients. Allow them to fill much more than base ingredients sum. Make them eatable with low hunger fill per one bite/gulp, but give them more portions (like pies with 8 bites instead of 4).
This way, a mono diet, with simple, one ingredient snacks or even raw food would be inferior to multi ingredients cooking recipes

I think you have a good idea to improve food diversification.

Maybe a complex food with many ingredients could give some pips in the hunger bar beyond the maximum for a certain duration.

But in the end it seems normal to me that a given community should orient itself towards a specific type of diet that depends on its environment.

jere · 2018-06-07 12:30:11

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.

A more realistic and satisfying interpretation of this would be the type of food and its novelty affecting how hungry you have to be to eat it. Think of Thanksgiving dinner. If I'm hungry, I'll eat some peas and carrots. If I'm near full, I don't want vegetables anymore. But I'll eat turkey and ham and stuffing. Now I'm full. Maybe a buttered roll? OK, now I'm super stuffed and I shouldn't really eat another bite and I really don't want real food. But I will definitely eat desert!

This is interesting mechanically because a food that you can only eat when super hungry is inconvenient and risky. Say carrots can never be eaten above half hunger and if you eat enough of them, you'll only be able to eat another on your last pip of hunger. That food becomes dangerous. Rely too much on the berry bush and you'll grow tied to the berry bush. To fill up for a long trek, you'll need a more novel food supply. As food evolves and you get things like candy and sweets, that should allow you to push your hunger way above full. Then you can ignore food for a while.

This is something you see in roguelikes anyway. in DCSS, trolls can eat raw meat all the time but other species have to be near starving to consume it. That becomes a problem because the food you find rots while you're waiting to get hungry enough to eat it.

Similar to your hot sauce example and more practical, salt could be an easy way to increase the flavor of foods.

On the messaging: hunger thresholds might be easier to communicate too. While holding a carrot, your hunger bar could indicate the threshold at which you'll be able to eat it (and it could be momentarily animated lower when you do). Having discrete hunger pips would help with this though.

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

Something I've been meaning to ask... are you worried about over-engineering the stone age part of the game? Does it have to be perfectly balanced and massively deep if there are other stages of the game one can reach? I assume the 10,000 objects has to eventually be filled with more advanced technologies instead of thousands of different food items.

Last edited by jere (2018-06-07 12:39:22)

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Re: The mono diet

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