The mono diet

Christoffer · 2018-06-07 12:40:21

A conversation with a colleague yielded a fresh idea on how to break up the mono culture farming by introducing more types of soil. I posted it in a fresh thread here:
https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=2018

jasonrohrer · 2018-06-07 17:14:14

Jere, it's funny that I've "known" you for years online, and this is the first time I'm picturing you eating thanksgiving dinner. A whole new dimension has been added. Would you really eat a buttered roll right at the end?

Such a good boy, eating his vegetables first and his desert last!

First of all, WHY do I want to make 100s of different foods? It's not to "fill up" the tech tree. It's a drop in the 10K bucket, really, even if I have 300 foods. It's not a stone age thing, either. I mean, sushi and applesauce and butter and sous vide tri-tip? It's a more general question, because advanced tech (later) will allow different ways of interacting with foods, or making foods, or storing them. Food is the great need. Even though, in modern times, we've "freed" ourselves from constant hunger and food production, our day still revolves around food. Most people spend most of their money on food (especially if they go out to eat a lot, which a lot of people do). Three meals a day. Grocery shopping.

As tech advances, food should require less and less time per calorie to produce, and also be more and more efficient in terms of resources. We've currently seen 200+ generations. I think they eventually stopped out of boredom again. But if core resources are really running out correctly, it should be a challenge to get to 200. And more modern tech should help push it, if you can get to the modern tech before exhausting the resources. What about 1000 or 10,000 generations?

Still, I can imagine one narrow slice of the food tech tree being sufficient to support this. You know, the slice leading up to just Soylent, or whatever the in-game equivalent is, and you rush soylent from Eve, and then live 10,000 generations before running out of resources.

But the other interesting thing about 10,000 objects is that humans made them all for some reason. The world is just so full of things. And foods, and food preparation devices, are a huge part of that. Kraut boards. Tofu pressing boxes. Carboys and airlocks. Honey centrifuges.

The game is a love letter to the world. I love all this stuff that people have made. I love all these foods. I want them in the game.

How can this game exist without sushi? Or pirogies? Or olives? Or century old eggs? These are part of the story of civilization.

The hunger system in this game has gone through many iterations. I've always been wondering, for years, why someone would eat different types of food instead of just one.

There was a time where a given food would fill you up to it's particular limit, and no more. So eating berries would fill you up to 5, and no more. More berries wouldn't fill you up more. If you ate carrots, that would fill you up to 7 and no more. Eating a million carrots would not fill you past 7.

Various pies would then fill you up to higher and higher levels.

This essentially dictated how long you could go between meals depending on what you had been eating. If you were eating berries, you were weak and hungry all the time. You couldn't travel far.

This helps motivate different foods, but only about 20 foods, because there are only 20 gradations on the hunger bar (even if I made it finer, the differences would be so small as to not matter).

This also made the game horrible to play, especially in the beginning, because you were constantly hungry and couldn't get anything done.

Switching to a "stacking" hunger bar (where you can fill it up to max incrementally by eating more and more of whatever) made it so that the more filling foods are mostly motivated by portability for travel. Still, we only get about 20 foods out of that (unless multiple bites are considered), but even there, you can only motivate things so far by travel requirements. I mean, how far are people going, and how often? Are they really going to need the super pie that fills you up to 20 a dozen times?

More recently, it seemed like cultivation differences would help.

Jere's suggestion is somewhat similar to how it used to work, long ago. The less tasty items only get you so far. In the beginning, you couldn't fill up on berries, because berries would be too gross to each much of. So you'd be stuck down at 6 hunger bars while living on berries, waiting until you're almost dead before eating more.

You could even imagine multch or twigs being edible if things got bad enough.

And then, the most delicious food in the world can be eaten to top you off any time? "Just one more wafer thin mint! Surely you have room for it, sir." "No no, I'm sssstuffffed. I can't eat another bite."

Still seems like we only get about 20 different foods out of this, though. I guess with your suggested bonus for really delicious food, like candy, we could go higher (above 20, filling up a reserve tank or something). But not much higher. Maybe we could have 40 foods this way.

The other problem is that the finer distinctions won't matter much. The difference between the 19 and 20 foods really don't matter (in any system: stacking foods, fill-you-to-a-level foods, or how-hungry-do-you-need-to-be foods).

I'm still trying to figure out how you could have 10 different "20-point" foods and still want to eat all of them, even if they all have different resource/time requirements to make them.

YAHG · 2018-06-07 19:07:35

Someone posted foods having effects, that could be a good reason to eat them?

They could make you move faster, be warmer/colder, fertile/infertile, increase your max bar for a while,
let you be less slowed down when carrying heavy things, they can could have mixes of positive and
negative effects so as you go up and up they get better and better.

Spockulon · 2018-06-07 19:24:41

What about using an ancient concept?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sis … riculture)

Growing three different varieties of crop on one plot of soil.

YAHG · 2018-06-07 19:34:47

Spockulon wrote:

What about using an ancient concept?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sis … riculture)
Growing three different varieties of crop on one plot of soil.

Savages Savages dirty sticking Savages.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQUIbJFeeKw

Turnipseed · 2018-06-07 20:00:09

jasonrohrer wrote:

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?

Turnips please!!!!

YAHG · 2018-06-07 20:01:39

Turnipseed wrote:

jasonrohrer wrote:
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?
Turnips please!!!!

We gonna put you in the ground..

Then we gonna water you..

jasonrohrer · 2018-06-07 20:31:27

Three sisters is on my list for this week. Three Sisters stew, in fact.

Spockulon · 2018-06-07 20:49:10

jasonrohrer wrote:

Three sisters is on my list for this week. Three Sisters stew, in fact.

Cannot <3 this enough. Thank you!

jere · 2018-06-08 00:10:45

Heh. I was obsessed with bread as a kid and at thanksgiving would continue eating like 5+ rolls after consuming everything else. I don't have a healthy relationship with food. These days I'll finish off the last bite of potatoes/rice/chicken out of the pan by dousing it with salt. I've probably not explained the thanksgiving phenomenon thing well, but it's absolute a thing: http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2 … n-pie.html

I don't think the game should be made any more difficult than it already is. It's already bewildering for a new player. If you add any additional constraints to how food works, it's only fair to make the beginning game easier to balance it out. And remember it's not just different food types having different thresholds, but the repeated consumption of foods reducing the thresholds. You could make berries start by filling to 75% but quickly dropping with each bite (different foods could drop at different rates .... maybe pizza never gets less appetizing).

Having dozens of foods that feel really distinct is a challenge certainly. The foods that give you effects (warmth, fertility) is interesting. I'm for it. But I don't see it extending to too many combinations. Even 20+ distinct food items is a high bar.

Ultimately you're limited by the one hour life. Implement either the reduced satiation or hunger threshold and it won't matter much because .... how many times do you even eat to fullness in a lifetime.? 60 times? 30 times? Less? if You have 10 "levels" (whatever that means) per food, you're still not ensuring much variety. If there's a deterministic optimal route, players will use it. Maybe what you need is a system that extends beyond a single lifetime. Each character could have a favorite food that gives double satiety. That would definitely encourage people to diversify. Or maybe the boredom from each food extends across generations. Many generations in and carrots become useless. Berries become useless. Corn becomes useless. Force people to move up the tech tree? The cool thing about that is you could very easily control how fast people move away from the basics. Instead of limited resources by what's in the environment, it could be determined by what they've eaten in the past.

Medina · 2018-06-08 00:16:27

The easiest solution is usually the wrong one for making a video game. Don't introduce weird gimmicks to autobalance.

You want to nerf berries and keep balancing the game. It will be a better game for it.

I think the ideal would be to make different crops good for different things. Berries good early game because they are simple, but bad late game due to being water inefficient (This use to be the case before water was buffed so much that it didn't matter). Some foods are good for being compact like pies. Some foods are water efficient but more taxing to make. Balance heat mechanics, then make foods helpful for them. Introduce natural disasters like 100-year floods, then make foods that can survive them. Once you have more mechanics you will have more to work with .

Tane · 2018-06-08 02:00:30

It would be good if you had food effect your temp meter, that would get people making at least three types.

YAHG · 2018-06-08 02:26:31

I still think new foods sound like less interesting things than the other cool shit you put in. Like horses and sheep and stuff.

Rabbit hutches and Arboralism would be cooler than tacos!

Tacos are <3 IRL but I can not taste them in game.

xxx90x · 2018-06-08 02:30:21

That's a good idea, Let everyone starve to death.

Lotus · 2018-06-08 02:32:47

Immunity to shrooms if you eat enough of them

YAHG · 2018-06-08 02:34:08

Lotus wrote:

Immunity to shrooms if you eat enough of them

How many is enough?

Muddauber · 2018-06-08 03:09:19

I think the problem is that 1 second is literally over a week in this game. One pie literally takes weeks, maybe even months to prepare. I think it would fit the game more if we skipped a lot of food preparation and focused on food preservation like pickling and smoking/salting. If you were trying to roleplay which meal to eat to keep it interesting, I mean you're only eating like 2 meals a month so it just seems like an awkward marriage of ideas. I think food is too much of a focus, it should be relatively easy for even a decent sized tribe to survive off just hunting and gathering. The real struggle of this time period was horses, the people that learned to ride horses and shoot off them were the most dominant throughout history. Some of the Steppe peoples were terrifying nearly until modern history.

thewhiterabbit21 · 2018-06-08 14:13:14

This is a fascinating topic for me, personally, because I work with RDs and LDNs at a university with a prominent nutrition program. Jason, if you have any specific nutrition related questions, I can ask them for you or give you their email addresses or phone numbers.

But as a gamer, food consumer, and coworker of RDs, I would say that the best and simplest solution to me seems to be giving each character, when they are born, a randomly assigned, preferred food.

For example, if someone was born with a preference for corn, then corn would satisfy that craving more than any other food. This person would not know they had a corn preference until they tried a few different foods. And since everyone in the village would have a variety of preferences, then a variety of food would need to be grown.

This is also interesting too, because if an Eve spawned in with a carrot preference, and then was reborn in the village later, that player could have a berry preference in the next life. Therefore, it would behoove everyone to grow a variety of food for the future of the village and their future lives.

I guess it could get really complicated with more complex foods. But perhaps someone who has a predisposition to enjoy corn, will love corndogs even more? And of course, most people should love anything sugary, although too much sugar is also bad.

The thing about nutrition is... everything in moderation. Even if you LOVE corn, you still have to eat other foods in order to keep enjoying corn to your fullest capacity.

Unless, your favorite food happens to encapsulate all the foods you need... Such as pizza. I am eagerly awaiting the OHOL pizza party. Everyone making their own toppings to add to the pizza could be super fun!

Last edited by thewhiterabbit21 (2018-06-08 14:19:17)

jasonrohrer · 2018-06-08 15:11:56

A few follow-ups.

My 15-y-o pointed out that NO GAME has more than about 20 foods---for a reason. I think that Jere kinda said this too. Maybe it's an impossible problem to solve. But maybe it's not. Maybe this is the first game that needs to solve it.

Unique character food preferences are interesting. The problem I'm worried about is that they don't lead to cooperation. If I love figs, and want to spend village resources to grow fig trees, but no one else loves them, I become a wasteful eccentric. When I get a big crop of figs, I can't call everyone over to share this amazing new food that I've made, because the figs are wasted on everyone but me.

What I envision is that someone FINALLY makes sushi for the first time in the village, and everyone is called over and goes crazy for a bit eating this new, amazing food. Thank you SO MUCH for figuring out how to make this! This is amazing. We've all seen those "pie party" moments in the game already, when the baker's work pays off. Each new food created should be like that.

And then we all grow collectively bored of sushi. There's not one weird trick that keeps us food-happy forever.

Part of climbing the food tech tree will be expanding the palate of food variety that is available. There are only so many gradations possible in terms of how filling a food can be or how many bites it has. If I keep pushing that for the higher-tech foods, we very quickly get into "make this one 12-slice pizza and then eat it for the rest of your life". I.e., we run out of room to make things any better further up the tree. We're already kinda out of room. And "special effects" is limited too. How many effects could there be?

So why, once you get higher tech, do you want to keep exploring the food part of the tech tree? "For the sake of variety" seems to be the answer. So variety itself has to give you an advantage in some way.

The simplest idea that I can come up with (probably too simple) is that the very first time you eat any food in your lifetime, you get a "bonus" fullness that is above and beyond your normal hunger bar. "Bingo! That was sooo good that you don't have to eat for a while now." This would be true in early game as well, when you taste wild onions for the first time.

So, making new foods is the most efficient use of resources, always. If resources are truly running out over time, the only way a village can extend its lifetime is to make the largest possible variety of foods so that everyone gets this bonus as often as possible.

YAHG · 2018-06-08 15:16:39

jasonrohrer wrote:

A few follow-ups.
My 15-y-o pointed out that NO GAME has more than about 20 foods---for a reason. I think that Jere kinda said this too. Maybe it's an impossible problem to solve. But maybe it's not. Maybe this is the first game that needs to solve it.
Unique character food preferences are interesting. The problem I'm worried about is that they don't lead to cooperation. If I love figs, and want to spend village resources to grow fig trees, but no one else loves them, I become a wasteful eccentric. When I get a big crop of figs, I can't call everyone over to share this amazing new food that I've made, because the figs are wasted on everyone but me.
What I envision is that someone FINALLY makes sushi for the first time in the village, and everyone is called over and goes crazy for a bit eating this new, amazing food. Thank you SO MUCH for figuring out how to make this! This is amazing. We've all seen those "pie party" moments in the game already, when the baker's work pays off. Each new food created should be like that.
And then we all grow collectively bored of sushi. There's not one weird trick that keeps us food-happy forever.
Part of climbing the food tech tree will be expanding the palate of food variety that is available. There are only so many gradations possible in terms of how filling a food can be or how many bites it has. If I keep pushing that for the higher-tech foods, we very quickly get into "make this one 12-slice pizza and then eat it for the rest of your life". I.e., we run out of room to make things any better further up the tree. We're already kinda out of room. And "special effects" is limited too. How many effects could there be?
So why, once you get higher tech, do you want to keep exploring the food part of the tech tree? "For the sake of variety" seems to be the answer. So variety itself has to give you an advantage in some way.

The simplest idea that I can come up with (probably too simple) is that the very first time you eat any food in your lifetime, you get a "bonus" fullness that is above and beyond your normal hunger bar. "Bingo! That was sooo good that you don't have to eat for a while now." This would be true in early game as well, when you taste wild onions for the first time.

So, making new foods is the most efficient use of resources, always. If resources are truly running out over time, the only way a village can extend its lifetime is to make the largest possible variety of foods so that everyone gets this bonus as often as possible.

What if you just got one extra hunger bar or something for every food you have tried?
Still die at 60 obvs, would also help with the people dying before they got to their snacks.

I could see people hand feeding babies food to make them more last longer between feedings .

aowen · 2018-06-08 15:24:08

jasonrohrer wrote:

The simplest idea that I can come up with (probably too simple) is that the very first time you eat any food in your lifetime, you get a "bonus" fullness that is above and beyond your normal hunger bar.

"Bonus" as in the first time you eat it, you are filled to max + X beyond your hunger bar?

Or is it that you are filled the regular amount (3 for berry, for example), but you get to wait longer to eat?

Potjeh · 2018-06-08 15:29:32

jasonrohrer wrote:

My 15-y-o pointed out that NO GAME has more than about 20 foods---for a reason

O RLY?

Pages in category "Foods"
The following 200 pages are in this category, out of 354 total.

Last edited by Potjeh (2018-06-08 15:30:16)

jasonrohrer · 2018-06-08 15:48:36

I'll make some time to play this game this weekend.

But it looks like the kind of complicated under-the-hood food system that I'm trying to avoid. Eating a fish eyeball satisfies you both along the fish and a sausage axes.

http://ringofbrodgar.com/wiki/Food_Satiations

There are currently 15 different satiation categories.

Muddauber · 2018-06-08 15:50:17

I was thinking about this a lot and I have an idea.

Let's say that the food bar is color coded. You eat a veggie, you gain green food bars, you eat meat, red food bars, you eat berries, you get blue. Each food group could then take different rates to burn off. Fruit would used for energy first, being the least filling food. Veggies could be medium, and meat gives you fat, which would take the longest to burn off. This seems not super-crazy to implement, forces people to eat varied diets, and also simulates things like being fat-starved if you're only eating berries to survive.

Also, then later more complicated foods like sushi could provide more portions and add more food bars. Maybe some things like sushi even give you x amount of fat and x amount of veggie bars, adding a lot of variety in how we feed ourselves.

What do you guys think?

Last edited by Muddauber (2018-06-08 15:55:25)

YAHG · 2018-06-08 15:50:30

Potjeh wrote:

jasonrohrer wrote:
My 15-y-o pointed out that NO GAME has more than about 20 foods---for a reason
O RLY?
Pages in category "Foods"
The following 200 pages are in this category, out of 354 total.

http://ringofbrodgar.com/wiki/Creamy_Cock wtf...

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#51 2018-06-07 12:40:21

Re: The mono diet

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