Idea to reduce food waste and make "big foods" more beneficial

jasonrohrer · 2019-11-06 00:21:46

This issue has been lurking for a while:

https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife/issues/394

For what it's worth, I'm not particularly worried about "food waste" as a factor, and I'm not going to change the rhythm of the game to prevent it.

However, the discussion did get me thinking about a related issue:

A food can only get "so big" before its no longer beneficial for it to get any bigger. Stomach size is 20 in adulthood, which means we only have 20 units of granularity to play with. Food "bites" were added to give some more granularity, where a pie can be eaten multiple times. But even there, a single bite of berry-carrot-rabbit pie fills you up 20, and we can't really get better than that, especially not for feast foods that don't make sense to pack/carry with multiple bites.

YUM was added to help deal with this and encourage diet variety, so even if you had two different 20-pip foods, eating both would be better than just mono-munching one of them forever. Still, unless you have a very long chain going, the effect is minimal. If you only have two 20-pip foods around, switching back and forth between them (short chain) is barely going to provide any benefit.

And there we sit. I simply can't add a 21-pip food, and each new food that I add only helps your YUM chain by an increment of 1.

Furthermore, when eating "big" foods, there's a kind of annoying "watch your food meter" game, if you don't want to waste food. You want to press your luck until there's plenty of room in your food meter. In rare circumstances, this might add a bit of drama, but when you've got a 20-pip pie in your backpack, it's a "sure thing" that you just need to manage by babysitting it.

And for most players who are sticking around town, there's absolutely no surface difference between munching 6 berries and eating the best pie around.

"Bad" players might eat a pie to top off their last few pips, and even experts might do this when trying to build YUM in a hurry. But being "good" at this isn't a skill, and isn't interesting.

What's the true down-side, to the YUM-ignorant individual, of filling up on popcorn?

So, what if:

1. You could only eat a food if your meter had at least one empty pip (same as currently).

2. Whatever food you eat fills those empty pips (same as currently)

3. Any extra food value for that filling bite, beyond topping you off, goes into your +X bonus meter.

This has some interesting properties:

1. Food waste becomes impossible.

2. Rapid-fire YUM chaining becomes slower (you have to wait for your bonus meter to empty out, and it will be fuller)

3. Big foods, when eaten on a near-full stomach, become vastly superior to small foods (when prepping for a long journey).

4. Food burn rate per person, etc remains unchanged. The game difficulty is not fundamentally changed.

5. Obviously, this makes the game feel easier, despite (4), but note that any "new easiness" comes exclusively from the lack of food waste (though the new banking capability might make the food burn rate easier to manage for some players).

6. Hello 40-pip feast plates.

Thaulos · 2019-11-06 00:50:20

I'm overall in favor of a system like this.

A few extra thoughts:

Ideally food that is cooked should be much better than raw food. "Stationary food" should also be much better than "carry-on food". Meaning, berries and carrots shouldn't be on par with carrot pies. And mutton pies shouldn't be on par with stew.

In my opinion "Carry-on food" should work as a backup or snack, not as the staple food.

In addition to all this, I also think that you shouldn't be able to fill yourself to the brim with berries (or any one food). Would it be possible to limit how much pips you can get from a single source? If you ate a berry you would get 5 pips. But you wouldn't be able to eat more berries until at least one of those pips "decayed". And even then you would only gain up to 5 pips from that food.

Last edited by Thaulos (2019-11-06 00:51:19)

Coconut Fruit · 2019-11-06 00:55:33

I like it.
Maybe 20 pips stomach size will be too big then? Maybe it should be only 10 after this change?

Thaulos · 2019-11-06 00:57:36

I would actually argue for doubling our current pips even with this change tbh.

olooopo · 2019-11-06 00:59:41

So, if u get a bb in the middle of nowhere you just shove a burrito or pie into its mouth, wish it good luck and you go your way?

fug · 2019-11-06 01:05:02

Here's the some of the biggest issues:

By allowing extra pips to be saved by overeating basically yumming without all the extra management you really burst open how easy the game is. You'd be seeing smart players doing stuff like inflicting themselves with yellow fever to remove pips while avoiding losing any of their bonus pips. Currently in game our only need is to eat which means whenever you make food better in some way you potentially drastically cut down on difficulty while also reducing the amount of work needed overall. Easy food is generally bad (see the examples of carrot stacking, regrowing bananas, regrowing mangoes, etc) as it causes the players to basically devolve into sitting around doing nothing.

Food should never be free, and it should almost always come at some sort of cost whether it be space; (shrimp, milk, buttered bread, mango slices, popcorn, carnitas) time; (mango slices, mushrooms, tacos, burritos, ice cream, chips, french fries); or resources (berry food variants, carrots, onions, fresh corn).

Don't get me wrong, food has been something that has been needed reworked for a long time as more processed/advanced foods are much worse than low tier food. People don't fish because who wants to waste time learning a skill + collecting worms for a 20 pip food? I can just go get an egg from the swamp that respawns every 20 minutes and has plenty of other ponds nearby for the same pip value, easier collection, and much less set up. Hot coals ends up being a much better use of a skill slot considering you have to cook eggs and fish on hot coals but fishing has a second skill requirement.

Some previous ideas people have come up with to try to combat the issue at hand:

Extra yummy foods- Instead of everything being on a simple scale of 0-20 you have foods that are high pip and low yum, low pip high yum, high pip and even yuck like when burnt fish was edible. It's food but it's really unenjoyable to eat so you might get 20 pips out of it but you effectively remove some of your yum multiplier. On the other hand something like ice cream is really yummy but not very filling so you get a jump start on your yum chain but don't get very filled. I guess you could also do low pips/yuck combination (raw egg, sheep dung, raw meat) though that would likely be used to grief. "Stop George, he's eating all our shit!"

Yum works as permanent extra pips: Instead of just doing temporary pips which can be abused through stuff like yellow fever abuse what if yum just gave you more pip squares overall per thing you ate? This means as you slowly eat different things you're able to gain extra pips throughout your life. Maybe tier two starts as split pip boxes (twisted had these and blue ones drafted up before) or your squares turn blue to denote you have another tier. This would effectively raise the pip cap from 20 to something like 65-70+ depending on how much one person is willing to grab different foods.

Make different foods decay: Raw meats, vegetables, fruits, unprocessed foods, etc should without a doubt go bad. Want to keep your mutton for longer? Salt and smoke it to make mouflon jerky instead of eating 2000 year old meat. Uh oh, you left that onion alone too long and now it's covered in roots! Maybe add these spoiled foods to a recipe for compost or make them disappear. Whatever you do, foods lasting forever is generally just bad as good players will very much outproduce their own need within their life if devoting it to cooking.

Coconut Fruit · 2019-11-06 01:12:49

Even tho I'm not a yummer I would want to make mono diet less attractive somehow, especially if this update will happen. Idk, maybe having less than 5 yum chain could make you sick after eating non yum food (something simillar to yellow fever). Yumming is not really that beneficial in current state, genetic fitness system makes it even less attractive for girls.

jasonrohrer · 2019-11-06 01:24:59

Forgot about the baby issue...

Fug, I'm not sure if you're missing something here or not.

When you're almost full, the proposal is that you'd be able to eat one last food and "top off" with bonus pips for the excess. This will NOT allow you to eat 10 pies in a row and get 200 bonus pips. The max bonus pips from over-full will be whatever the max food is in the game, minus one.

Currently, the max food is 20, I think. So if you have 19 pips, and you eat the best pie, you'll get 20 regular pips +19 bonus.

As long as you have bonus pips (or all-full regular pips), you won't be able to eat anything else, just like currently.

I do see that being able to get 39 total pips whenever you want, without even yumming, is pretty outta whack. Though the high-value foods that allow you to do this are much harder to make. Yumming with a bunch of low-value foods is currently pretty easy.

To balance this out without making the early game way too hard, it seems like going down to 15 main food pips will be necessary. Then eating a berry at near-full will take you pretty much up to the "old full" of 20.

Though with this system in place, eating a pie when not almost full could be seen as wasteful...

I didn't know about the yellow fever exploit that keeps yum. I'll fix that. Yellow fever is supposed to require help of others to nurse you back to health.

And I hear you about cramming a pie down a BB's throat.... This also makes the small stomach of childhood and old age much less meaningful.

Anyway, it sounds like this is too risky of a change to make....

Coconut Fruit · 2019-11-06 02:03:22

olooopo wrote:

So, if u get a bb in the middle of nowhere you just shove a burrito or pie into its mouth, wish it good luck and you go your way?

It wouldn't be an issue if +pips were unavailable for kids.

jasonrohrer wrote:

Anyway, it sounds like this is too risky of a change to make....

Damn...

jasonrohrer · 2019-11-06 02:10:50

But +pips being unavailable for kids would be one more invisible feature that would confuse people...

And that solution also doesn't help for the elderly, who are supposed to get less and less capable. If they could just scarf a huge pie, that would undercut how weak they are.

Joseph Stalin · 2019-11-06 02:13:20

sad i would like this

Joseph Stalin · 2019-11-06 02:14:20

just make it so that under 3 cant eat real food except mashed berry and carrot

fug · 2019-11-06 02:36:53

It would definitely take way too much effort to buff high pip foods in this way and it turn out good (aka balanced.)

One egg = double your pips as an adult which is incredibly goofy considering their cost. Even when lowering the total pips from 20 to 15 this means nude you would go from starving in seventy seven seconds up to 144 seconds or two minutes and 24 seconds. Going to the extreme it would be something crazy like eating once every 10 minutes if you were fishing/baking/whatever on a perfect tile which is absolutely nuts to say the least.

Thematically it doesn't make sense that you want to eat when you're already nearly stuffed to the max. Wasting food by not eating it when you're full is just plain silly and goes against anything you've ever learned in survival games.

Stuffing babies and the elderly also means you can avoid having to care for babies even less than you do in the current game. Imagine shooting from being born straight to maximum pups (and more). That's not good for the parenting side of the game and is overall just a head scratcher. "Here baby eat this fish so you don't need to eat for the next two+ minutes. Oh full grown now? Go eat something else."

While this solves one problem (big pip foods are basically bad) it just causes a bunch of other problems (thematic fail, babies first food is giant pip foods, people eating when full instead of when starving, foods are not balanced effort wise at all to support something like this.)

Better to take the idea back to the drawing board instead of trying to put a flawed system in place that will without a doubt require a lot of tweaking.

DestinyCall · 2019-11-06 02:46:28

Joseph Stalin wrote:

just make it so that under 3 cant eat real food except mashed berry and carrot

Lol ... I love this idea. But it should also include mashed carrot in bowl.

Keyin · 2019-11-06 02:56:05

why not do something similar to Haven and Hearth to balance it out?

In Haven and Hearth, when you overeat it makes you slow(to represent being stuffed)

Something like 20-30% lower speed I think would be good.

If you decided to do that, you'd also need to make it so that people can't overfeed you to make you slow as a way to grief/troll.

Also, maybe lower the food pips to 15 like you were saying and make your max food bonus 3x your stomach? so a baby with 3 pips max bonus could be 9 pips.

Coconut Fruit · 2019-11-06 03:02:05

Keyin wrote:

and make your max food bonus 3x your stomach? so a baby with 3 pips max bonus could be 9 pips.

2x would be enough. This is actually not bad idea. Thanks to that elders and kids still would be weak as they supposed to be.

wondible · 2019-11-06 03:43:19

Coconut Fruit wrote:

Keyin wrote:
and make your max food bonus 3x your stomach? so a baby with 3 pips max bonus could be 9 pips.
2x would be enough. This is actually not bad idea. Thanks to that elders and kids still would be weak as they supposed to be.

Yeah, I was going to say limit to as much bonus as regular. It could be visually tied to the normal box system to make the limit clearer. It might have to limit yum as well, unless that stays as a separate +x.

jasonrohrer · 2019-11-06 04:12:52

Yeah, the 2x limit is an interesting idea.

But it still wouldn't help me make "feast" foods that are over 20 pips. I mean, I guess the 40-pip food could be saved until famished and push an adult up to 40 pips total. But might as well eat a 20-pip food when full, right?

There's also thematic insanity, currently, when eating a huge food on a nearly-full stomach. Yes, it might be poor play or even griefing.... but it also makes no sense.

However, the idea of having to "wait" until your stomach is empty enough for a big food would also being annoying. Especially since you'd have to constantly test it. Am I hungry enough now? Nope! How about now? Still nope!

Though it would be nice if BB simply couldn't eat big pies, etc. That would make certain small foods bb-food, which is thematically nice.

antking:]# · 2019-11-06 04:30:40

I think that the main problem is the food values them selves, not the system. I saw this problem way back, instead of changing and balancing food values, you just keep increasing them, trying to give us incentive to make them...
but do you see those High pip foods? No, that's because why would you take the time to make tacos, if you could just spam Mutton pies. why would you raise a goose into adult hood if you could just make an omelet witch has the same pip value as BOTH bites of the cooked goose.

what I think we need right now is for food values to be reworked, and how food is produce, think about what if sheep didn't produce as much mutton, or cooked goose was better then one simple omelet, or berries gave such a small food value that they just can't be a part of a diet (1 pip)

I think that Fug's consept of space, time, and resources is something that is need to be looked into and thought about... so we can find a way to balance this food crisis.

Coconut Fruit · 2019-11-06 04:44:44

jasonrohrer wrote:

Yeah, the 2x limit is an interesting idea.
But it still wouldn't help me make "feast" foods that are over 20 pips. I mean, I guess the 40-pip food could be saved until famished and push an adult up to 40 pips total. But might as well eat a 20-pip food when full, right?

If you reduced stomach size to 15 pips, max an adult could do would be 30 pips. It's not that crazy amount.

Coconut Fruit · 2019-11-06 04:48:13

antking:]# wrote:

, or berries gave such a small food value that they just can't be a part of a diet (1 pip)

While 1 pip berries wouldn't be problem in advanced towns, it would be a big problem in very beginning towns.

DestinyCall · 2019-11-06 04:57:03

Best solution ... more bites.

I've looked at food efficiency in OHOL in depth. Mutton pie is good for a lot of reasons, but one of the big ones is that it is a multi-bite food that is also containable. Most foods must be put into a bowl or set on a plate, so they can't be carried easily. Or they are only one or two bites. Many of the other multi bite foods are "small bites" which take longer to eat and don't give as much food even when you consume the whole food item, like popcorn or green beans. Pies are better, because they pack a lot of food into a space-efficient package (and mutton pie is made from byproducts which make it almost free, but that is beside the point). A pie fits into one slot in your backpack, yet it holds four individual bites of decent size. It is a really good food.

Make more portable foods that have multiple bites instead of one BIG hungry-man bite. Right now artic char gives 20 pips and is eaten as a single bite which completely fills an adult pip bar.
But you could have one big fish that gives X pips spread across four to six bites. It could still give 20 pips ... or it could give a lot more than twenty. Mutton pie is 15 pips per bite, so one pie is 60 pips! You could easily make a big fish that is equal or better than a pie. Or you could keep the total pips the same and just spread it out so it is harder to over-eat and waste the meal. Anything more than 16 to 18 pips is essentially wasted food anyways.

Tempted · 2019-11-06 05:17:42

Pemmican

CatX · 2019-11-06 07:50:46

I think more bites is a good idea.

And more foods with several bites.

And perhaps it should be possible to eat more than one bite in one go.

If a slice of turkey for example had 5 bites, by eating it the adult might consume all five bites in one go, but a child might consume only one.

And coupled with decaying foods, people (hopefully) would be less concerned with others overeating and just happy that someone eats the food before it vanishes.

miskas · 2019-11-06 08:24:22

jasonrohrer wrote:

Yeah, the 2x limit is an interesting idea.
But it still wouldn't help me make "feast" foods that are over 20 pips. I mean, I guess the 40-pip food could be saved until famished and push an adult up to 40 pips total. But might as well eat a 20-pip food when full, right?
Though it would be nice if BB simply couldn't eat big pies, etc. That would make certain small foods bb-food, which is thematically nice.

All fixed by math :(Y) extra stomach, (x) current total peeps
extra stomach =0.00001* current total peeps^5
https://www.desmos.com/calculator/p25odmsmp8

BBs cant eat pies, Elder stomach matters, Max Total stomach 52.

Can we have the change now?

Last edited by miskas (2019-11-06 10:02:01)

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#1 2019-11-06 00:21:46

Idea to reduce food waste and make "big foods" more beneficial

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