Future of Food

Anandamide · 2019-02-15 05:39:08

There is lots of talk about small food updates, people want a specific food or crop, but I hear few compelling reasons for why to actually add those foods aside from variety. This game will go very badly if things are just tacked on, so every new technology or product will need a reason beyond itself for inclusion.

BIG YUM ENERGY

With the way yum works, few people use it, but with the large number of possible foods it is very unbalanced for those who seek out yum, which isnt terrible, not everything needs to not be magic, and there is an argument for a balanced diet, but if you hit 20+ yum its kinda crazy, as eating a balanced diet irl does not let you go days without food with no ill effects. Adding in more foods with the way crops are grown now adds to this, so if we are to add in new foods, they should require considerable labor or resources and technologies to produce. I propose there be a difference between the berries from domestic and wild bushes, like carrots, and that all raw domestic foods provide no yum. Only prepared foods will and they will provide varying yum based on the difficulty to produce. A food's yum will depend on how many food groups it includes. Items with only one ingredient type (bread, bowl of bean or berries) will only provide one and can only push you up to 5 yum, foods providing two yum can only take you to ten (single ingredient pies and whatnot) and ones containing many groups will provide 3+ and take you further(up to maybe a cap?). That would not include say berry carrot pies, you need a meat in there. Another system could be similar, but the groupings would just be decided based on the difficulty of producing the food. Eating a basic domestic food should kill your yum bonus as well. It could even keep track of which ingredients you have already eaten in your chain, and subtract a point or two leaving at worst one yum if you have already eaten all those ingredients in other foods. Sugar from honey should be the "ultimate" yum adding many points to the foods it can be added to. Maybe there could even be a penalty for too high of a yum. Dental caries, or cavities are far more common in developed countries with a sweet tooth. Hitting a really high yum could increase your hunger rate to offset how unbalanced yum gets at a high level.

Domestication, the flowers and the bees, nightshades, container growing

Because its a game, with limited time, lots of abstractions must be made, so it is fair for at least some crops to be domesticated the way they are currently, you just get a seed from a wild plant and there is your domestic crop. The problem with adding in more crops is that only the food and harvests are different, but getting the first plant is essentially the same. I propose we bring some sex to the game and talk about flowering plants and bees. Jason started down the path with seed stratification and roses, getting multiple unique domestics from one wild plant, but we can take it further by adding a flowering cycle to a some plants before they fruit, and require pollination for them to bear fruit. Right now I see two plant families that would be great for this mechanic: brassicas and nightshades. Tomatoes, eggplants, chilies, potatoes are all nightshades, and while none of these plants were domesticated from an original plant, but instead were domesticated from plants that had already long ago split off from each other. Since we are in the spirit of abstraction, we can just pretend they were all domesticated from a single species(and ignore potatoes). There would be say three different wild nightshade plants, which would each bear one or two berries that are inedible and can be planted. At the same time, there would be wild beehives, which would send out one or two bee's at a time to a fixed distance in search of flowering plants. The initial three nightshades would look basically the same, and would after fully growing go into a flowering cycle, and if a pollinator comes to it during the flowering cycle, it will bear fruit, and if not go back to the pre flowering cycle and wait again for the next time. These plants would produce no food, perhaps again just one or two berry like fruits. After fruiting, there should be a fixed chance that the plant would need to be fed again like a berry bush before resetting its cycle, and dying if not cared for in time. The next tier would be to grow the plant in a clay container, which could say be made of three clay, and be reusable if the plant dies. These would bear an additional fruit, but would now be annuals and need replanting after harvest and also would be necessary to further domesticate the plant. Now, the next technology would be to make a brush, which should require an iron for the brush, and potentially more for the brush making tools(this could be used also for say brushes for painting on signs instead of having to handmake letters). You would need to do a hand pollination of each of the three plants to the two other plants so, A + B, B + C, A + C, and after one of these pollination occur, the plant will produce different seeds that would lead to the next three plants, basic tomato, basic eggplant and basic chili. These also would only be able to be grown in the container and would also require pollination. Note, hand pollination would be the only one that would produce new plants, insect pollination would just let it go to the fruiting stage but those fruits seeds would still make the same plant. Back pollinating these with two of the original plants will further stratify into two kinds, for tomatoes say cherry ones with many little fruit, and larger ones with just a few per plant, two kinds of chilies and two kinds of eggplants. The final tier of these plants would come much later in the tech tree, and im still fleshing out the idea, but they would be vining ones which require lots of infrastructure such as trellises and would grow over more than one tile(same mechanic could work for grapes too one day), and would be very labor intensive if grown in soil(requiring multiple bowls of water and soil per growth cycle, but would (now this is where we get into fantasy land) if grown say aquapoinically, require little labor at the cost of infrastructure. This would be done through clonal propagation by cutting the plant with shears, and maybe some other step requiring tools before planting the cutting.

Aquaponics

Aquaponics would be a huge endeavor, I envision each container being outfitted with a valve(could be the same one used for oil wells), and would be able to connect to two copper pipes, for input and output. You would dig special pits, that would join together if adjacent, for the pond, and would have to seal it with plaster for each hole. An intake pipe would be put in one tile, and an effluent pipe would be put on another, so at minimum a pond would require two holes. These pipes would be like floors so items could still be set atop them between the rows. A pump would be crafted from from some of the diesel engine parts, along with a rubber diaphragm, and added to a diesel engine. Somewhere in the system, two cisterns each with a valve would also need to be attached, one to the output line and one to the input, with the output one being filled with regular water. A bucket(or multiple) of water, and one fish would be placed in each empty pond, or just one and the others could populate from the one. A cycle would go something like this after the system is built, fish are in ponds, and plants are planted in each container. A worm would be fed into each pond, which would change the pond to a smelly pond (ammonia). The diesel pump would activate(or need to be activated, maybe upgrade able to auto action with computers one day), and would pump a buckets worth of water into the system, watering 10 of the plants, and turning the pond back into its normal state. This would have a 10% chance of draining one unit from the water cistern, equivalent to one bowl of water per cycle, to account for evapotranspiration. If there are not enough plots that need water when the cycle is run, the excess will go into the other cistern, and will immediately go to the plants when others become available for watering(cistern mechanic would need to be changed since they deal in buckets of water not bowls). Each plant will need a unit(or more) of water for each stage of the growth cycle (vining plants will require per tile of the vine per stage of growth, but would only use one container). Each time the pond is returned to normal, there will be a chance(im thinking 25%) that it will transition to a pond with fish and eggs, at which point the adult fish could be fished out, and after some time, would mature back to the original pond. Non flowering plants could also be grown with say the exception of wheat and berries because, yeah, and would function the same, Carrots could now all be plucked save for one for seed, since there is no more tilling. There additionally should be a chance for the pump to break on each cycle, requiring a pump repair kit (rubber diaphraghm + crankshaft or whatever).

The worms and the Bees

Worms lovely worms, no organic farm or aquaponics system would be complete without them. Its a shame that they were once a part of compost and are now just fish bait, but this is the dawn of vermiculture! A special worm box would be constructed, and filled with worm bedding and a worm. Worm bedding is made with shredded paper(shears + paper, or even shears + stack of papers), a bowl of mashed berry and carrot and a bowl of water and would produce three units like a pile of soil. One unit of bedding and 1 worm would after some time turn into a box of vermicompost, from which one basket of soil(enough to replenish one bush, and one row of carrots and part of a wheat) and one bowl of worms can be grabbed. Im thinking 6 worms in a bowl and they can be pulled out or put in one by one as well.

Beekeeping is an ancient tradition, and without effective pollination a number of crops are economically infeasible. But glorious honey and beeswax await. Natural beehives will spawn rarely in green biomes, which can be poked with a skewer to produce a honey stick , giving one serving of many pips(10?). This will anger the hive though and send a swarm at the attacking player for one minute(im thinking effects similar to yellow fever), up to a certain distance from the hive and then despawning, and only targeting that player(griefers are real so), so you better be quick if you have a sweet tooth. This will leave a damaged hive which will be repaired after some long period of time and will spawn subsequent swarms at players who get within say 3 tiles of the hive (but still target locked) while it is damaged. At camp, construct a smoker by hammering a hot iron bar into a charcoal canister(would be at the end of all the other iron items) and attaching this to a bellows, add one unit of charcoal and hit it with your fire stick and then you will have 5 minutes to bring it to the hive. You will also need a net hat (tied skewer + wooden disk > wooden ring + wooden disk and big ball of yarn + wooden ring +knitting needles gives net hat). Wearing the net hat will prevent bees from attacking you, other players in range of aggro hive will still be attacked though. Take this and the lit smoker to the hive, which will produce one incapacitated hive. Grab the hive and leave the smoker(or put in pack), hive cannot be put in containers except plate and go fast, as hive will die after (3?) minutes. At camp, hive + plate will give hive on plate and using a knife will produce a carved hive. Grabbing at this will give you a queen bee which must be placed into a Bee box. This is made with two boards and a rope. The box will require four frames which can each be made by adding a short staff to boards and then adding a rope. Put the four in after the queen and the finally the top (and you will have the base hive. The hive will send out bees to flowering plants in range, I feel that one hive should be sufficient for say 20(or less everything is up for debate) plants. Each time a bee visits a flowering plant, there will be a 20% chance for one of the frames to be filled, and when all are full you will have an oozing hive at which point the frames can be removed. Domestic bees will not attack players, except when you go to remove the frames, which will require your trusty net hat and smoker. Incapacitate the hive, and then remove the frames one at a time, put on a plate, and then cut with a knife to yield empty frames and plates of honeycomb. Add the four plates to a crock, put one on top and add a stone to press it. This will yield one bowl of honey and three bowls of beeswax. Honey must be collected before a hive will resume pollinating. Return the frames and put the lid back on and the cycle resumes. One hive is not enough though, so you can add tiers to the hive allowing it to send out one more swarm of bees to pollinate at a time. Only the frames in the top hive are accessible but adding the second and third tiers will allow it to collect honey faster and expand the range. A bowl of honey would need to be added to a glass jar, and to be eaten as a basic food a honey spoon would also need to be made. A bottle of honey would have many many servings, and provide only one pip, but a whopping 3 yum, and will become an ingredient in future baked goods(which would also have that big yum energy. Beeswax would potentially have many uses, but the one I propose is the hour candle, which would be a flame source that stays lit for 60 minutes. Put all three bowls of wax back in the crock and put on a fire, to produce melted wax. Use three glass jars to remove wax, and add a rope to each before they cool, if they cool before adding, holding jar of wax to fire will remelt. Empty jars can be reused but candles have 1/3 chance of breaking on candle burning out.

So I know this is a lot, would not come at once if not ever, but if we want food updates, they need to be part of a larger system of foods with interwoven dependencies, that utilize the new technology we have been given. Maybe Jason already has all kinds of plans that make this irrelevant, but we should really be talking about this kind of stuff. What would you want in a food overhaul? Do you like this plan or do you see a totally different direction? Parts of this could be applied to other techs and even farming, pumps bringing water to a cisterns at your baking and smithing stations, irrigation in a wheat field leaving a hardend row after harvest instead, or even put it in a berry field. We need a food update to end food updates, or a series of them and then leave it there save for future balancing as the game develops further.

Last edited by Anandamide (2019-02-15 05:40:03)

pein · 2019-02-15 09:27:40

yum hunting is a side effect, not an intended feature
i seen twisted, how dumb he manages his food, and generally how much time he is wasting, how much it sets him off.
while yum was a way to motivate food variety, it didnt really archieved the goal on low level

it would make more sense to limit top yum as well, personal high yum comes with the side effect of selfish behavior, they do varied diet, but they do it for themselves, while this case, they throw logic out of window, in a city, wild food is scarce, and maybe they can get a few burdocks and onions for themselves but thats not the intended purpose of yum, others will still eat berries
sometimes i see stew makers and maybe burrito makers, thats more like the intended purpose, grow other stuff and expand the possibilities for everyone, teach them the importance of it, adapt to the map
sometimes i cant find a plate to forge, and i dont care if you got 50 yum, i will force feed pies to you, to empty the plate, cause all those time you hunting yum bonus, you could of got some clay and make extra plates or arrange all the full plates in baskets and half empty ones offered to berry eaters so we got some free plates

maybe turn in yum for a reward would work, like yum caps would be 5 or 10 or maybe 15, i dont see the purpose of having more than that, like seriously, you waste your life eating and not doing anything decent?
stronghold crusader extreme had a feature where a bar charged up with time, and you could use special powers, this were great to initiate battle, and to break up defenses, wasnt over the top, but was pretty decent way to wait then time some actions

i cna think of speed bonus, insta baby born to you or the oldest/closest female, heat bonus, you convert it and start the chain again

this could be a city wide thing too, like show the overall food consumption and decrease berry munching under 50%

the problem with new foods is that we dont have too many options now, jason made a few categories, low, medium, high calories, portable, haf portable, non portable food (i gave the idea of family soup! and stew was born), single bites, multi bites, low tool usage, no tool usage, and some difference in time and cost

we need either a different system where you can go higher in food bars, have overlapping food bar with other effects to fertility/non fertility, body fat, etc.

lot of cool games reuse graphics and just add higher level of the same food/equipment
this would give better incentive to farming, my idea was rare seeds which could be replanted for faster/bigger/better yields like big berries which fill you up more or more berries per bush, a different color scheme, like darker green and bit different bush look, and voila, would be just as useful as making tools
we still got things which are quite logical to make: kill cows, get meat and hides, but then what to do with hides? thats a whole new update
or pig could have fat and use that for something, thats another update

Spoonwood · 2019-02-15 17:38:38

pein wrote:

sometimes i cant find a plate to forge, and i dont care if you got 50 yum, i will force feed pies to you, to empty the plate, cause all those time you hunting yum bonus, you could of got some clay and make extra plates or arrange all the full plates in baskets and half empty ones offered to berry eaters so we got some free plates

You can't eat iron or iron based tools or a radio. You make the wrong call by force feeding people managing their own diet and take responsibility for it. Those people may be have defects, but they manage their own problems. You want to run the forge? Well, if you don't have plates or bowls, then the settlement probably doesn't have enough or its food supply is so good that forging useful tools isn't needed to prevent starvation. So, you have the information which suggests a clay bowl or plate shortage or suggests that the colony has a lot of food and should be in good shape. Thus, you need to take responsibility and you can for that clay issue, go out, get clay, and fire it up. The settlement should also have more charcoal later which makes forging later and anything newcomen related a little easier. Seriously, if you have a clay bowl or plate shortage, you definitely shouldn't just use kindling to just fire charcoal.

Bottom line: people do NOT die from a lack of forging. People can die from a lack of starvation, and more food on plates makes it more difficult for people to starve who want to live. Even if you come back and insist that forging is for a useful water or soil supply, the water and soil supply are also in the end for food.

pein wrote:

maybe turn in yum for a reward would work, like yum caps would be 5 or 10 or maybe 15, i dont see the purpose of having more than that, like seriously, you waste your life eating and not doing anything decent?

That doesn't make any sense at all. Players who yum chain as much as they can spend less time eating than players who don't yum chain at all, because players who yum chain eat fewer meals. Players who don't yum chain have to waste their life eating, because they have to eat more meals. At least assuming that overfilling the pip bar comes as equivalent and their temperature is the same.

Michie · 2019-02-15 17:43:39

People can die from a lack of starvation (..)

...?

Anandamide · 2019-02-15 18:05:18

The reason people with Big Yum are being selfish is after 10 or 15, in a real village where stuff is constantly moving, you will have to take a non negligible amount of time to find new foods around the village, and might even need to produce foods that are fine if everyone did have that yum, but are very inefficient for anyone else to eat. Yum shouldnt just be based on variety, but on the complexity and cost of producing the food. This would naturally push villages to make more complex foods and make that mid level yum easier to achieve if you have those foods without spending so much time thinking about your yum chain and what food you are going to eat next. Even if you do it mostly automatically, it takes a non negligible mental load to work and think of the next food item and where it is and what your backup is if you cant find it. Yum is great when setting off on a big journey looking for resources, but often doesnt time up with when you want to leave, and if you cant find stuff in camp to do while waiting to build up the chain, you're wasting time you could be productive, and potentially hindering your civ from the next advancement.

As for the iron, I mean irl I dont eat oil but the majority of the fertilizer for the foods Ive eaten were made with it. Without iron, a village cannot survive for any meaningful amount of time. Stone hoes barely pay for their own milkweed, use up a straight shaft, and wastes yet another sharp stone in camp, and stresses the soil and water supply in an early civ because of the extra milkweed you need to grow. You need iron for bucks, and you're certainly not going to have enough rope for buckets if you're still using stone hoes. If you dont have a deep well by the time people are composting, unless you live in a field of ponds there will not be enough water to do anything, and even then probably not because one firing of a newcomen will use a whole pond up(you dont have any iron though so what am I saying). If you are composting and still using stone hoes, RIP, you'll need to make 3 of them at a time, and all that milkweed will use a whole pile of compost, if you do two bowls per milkweed, and use potentially use up an entire stone hoe planting all of that milkweed.

antking:]# · 2019-02-15 18:53:28

I like the Idea and I think seeing how the game is going adding the nightshade variances would be thrilling! Also scary as some species of nightshade is poisonous and it would be funny/scary if you were trying to domesticate a... tomato, and it turned out you were actually messing with the poisonous variant, causing you a quick death...
to the yum Idea I believe that we should scrap that idea as the yum system doesn't make any since. I think we should have a nutrient bar, with lets say, with vitamin A,B, and C (to keep it simple) and every food has different a affects to this bar, as each food has different nutrition value! and over time they would go down as your body uses up the vitamins.

I think your Idea is great and hopefully you posted it on reddit for Jason to see it! I think that this would be a big update!

FUN FACT Honey bees are actually invasive species from Europe!

DestinyCall · 2019-02-15 20:43:07

I think a vitamin system would be too abstracted and not really improve upon the current yum system, but I do like the idea of encouraging a more nuttitious, balanced diet.

Why not use food groups instead? Meat, dairy, vegetables, fruits, and grains. Simple foods would only satisfy one food group. Prepared foods, like pies and stews could give you multiple bonuses. Ideally, you would want to have five or six food categories, so people wouldn't be able to just eat one pie to get all the available nutrition bonuses in one bite.

More advanced towns would have more food options available for each category, as well as more combo foods, so it would get easier to max out your yum.

Last edited by DestinyCall (2019-02-15 20:51:19)

Booklat1 · 2019-02-15 21:49:55

FUTURE OF FOOD

hopefully nerfs

fragilityh14 · 2019-02-15 23:02:38

DestinyCall wrote:

I think a vitamin system would be too abstracted and not really improve upon the current yum system, but I do like the idea of encouraging a more nuttitious, balanced diet.
Why not use food groups instead? Meat, dairy, vegetables, fruits, and grains. Simple foods would only satisfy one food group. Prepared foods, like pies and stews could give you multiple bonuses. Ideally, you would want to have five or six food categories, so people wouldn't be able to just eat one pie to get all the available nutrition bonuses in one bite.
More advanced towns would have more food options available for each category, as well as more combo foods, so it would get easier to max out your yum.

When Jason made the Yum system he said he's never like nutrition systems in games, even in a game he made with a nutrition system.

pein · 2019-02-16 00:50:22

spoonwood, the reason some lineages stay alive and some dont, is because some lineages got peopel who work hard for tech

i seen people who say 'we dont need forging, we need food'
food for what? food is gaining time, i dont have to play 40 minutes to see an attempt is futile, i got 5 sisters, we got 2 soil pits, we got a cold camp, they eating berries, not everyoen gonna make it, and thats all right, if they cant stay alive, i dont need them, i dont owe them to feed them all their life, they need to be able to feed themselves

why do camps die? no food? thats because no one can cook the eggs and rabbits, cause no branches
there is a point when its not laziness that you dont have branches, its because getting some, takes 10 minutes, the biome is empty, you missed the deadline for the axe

no food cause no soil, because you dotn have a shovel to dig the soil pits for more soil, and no water cause no shovel to make a well

no pen cause no tools to get enough adobe/stones for pen

all this 3 can be solved with iron only, and startign it early before the baby boom. maybe 3 kids die cause i make tools, 15 will die if i dont
especially pro kids, who see your camp and quit, no tools? puck this place
then everyone who left needs to be fed all their lifes

and this doesnt even cut the first hour, cause you need 8 iron to make a mine, shovel and hoe isnt even needed for it but you need to make one after each half hour without a steady supply

plates shouldnt even be taken from forge, but if people do it, hunting yum wont solve that you got 20 plates with 10 bites on them and everything stagnates cause you wait the plates to make more pies

you dont save more time with yum, than producing pies en mass and compost
even making eggs or burrito is same thing as yumming if you do fast enough and dont waste much

making compost gives back the soil/water invested 10 times , so even eating berries while making compsot is better than yumming

ofc havign some carrot, stew, pies, popcorn helps but living to eat rather than eating to live isnt do any good for others
one berry on each bush means you already wasted time on regrowth, 3 bites missing on one pie and one on other, means you already wasted time on producing more pies

i dont yum chain for long, but im net positive by far, eating mutton pies i make from scratch

antking:]# · 2019-02-16 02:58:02

pein wrote:

spoonwood, the reason some lineages stay alive and some dont, is because some lineages got peopel who work hard for tech
i seen people who say 'we dont need forging, we need food'
food for what? food is gaining time, i dont have to play 40 minutes to see an attempt is futile, i got 5 sisters, we got 2 soil pits, we got a cold camp, they eating berries, not everyoen gonna make it, and thats all right, if they cant stay alive, i dont need them, i dont owe them to feed them all their life, they need to be able to feed themselves
why do camps die? no food? thats because no one can cook the eggs and rabbits, cause no branches
there is a point when its not laziness that you dont have branches, its because getting some, takes 10 minutes, the biome is empty, you missed the deadline for the axe
no food cause no soil, because you dotn have a shovel to dig the soil pits for more soil, and no water cause no shovel to make a well
no pen cause no tools to get enough adobe/stones for pen
all this 3 can be solved with iron only, and startign it early before the baby boom. maybe 3 kids die cause i make tools, 15 will die if i dont
especially pro kids, who see your camp and quit, no tools? puck this place
then everyone who left needs to be fed all their lifes
and this doesnt even cut the first hour, cause you need 8 iron to make a mine, shovel and hoe isnt even needed for it but you need to make one after each half hour without a steady supply
plates shouldnt even be taken from forge, but if people do it, hunting yum wont solve that you got 20 plates with 10 bites on them and everything stagnates cause you wait the plates to make more pies
you dont save more time with yum, than producing pies en mass and compost
even making eggs or burrito is same thing as yumming if you do fast enough and dont waste much
making compost gives back the soil/water invested 10 times , so even eating berries while making compsot is better than yumming
ofc havign some carrot, stew, pies, popcorn helps but living to eat rather than eating to live isnt do any good for others
one berry on each bush means you already wasted time on regrowth, 3 bites missing on one pie and one on other, means you already wasted time on producing more pies
i dont yum chain for long, but im net positive by far, eating mutton pies i make from scratch

seems like you would love to be a hermit!

One Hour One Life Forums

#1 2019-02-15 05:39:08

Future of Food

#2 2019-02-15 09:27:40

Re: Future of Food

#3 2019-02-15 17:38:38

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#4 2019-02-15 17:43:39

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#5 2019-02-15 18:05:18

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#6 2019-02-15 18:53:28

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