Default Hunger Rate Issue

[nip]

Am I crazy or is the default hunger rate ridiculous?

Eating a stack of berries and 10+ steaks and every cattail I can get my hands on to barely not starve to death is very annoying.

I found out you can change it so that's nice, but I have no idea why its so fast in the first place.

 

Edited October 14, 2024 by nip

[Krougal]

It's dynamic. When you get your saturation levels full from a balanced diet, then your food meter doesn't go down so fast. It also depends on your activity level and if you get injured you will also use up food fast to heal. It makes early game a little bit of a struggle but once you get your food supply secured you will be fine. After getting the basics (flint tools, baskets, torches, dirt hovel and initial pottery) my next priority is collecting all the seeds & bushes I can and getting farming started. I think this is a higher priority than getting copper since it keeps me from starving while I am mining.

[nip]

/worldconfig playerHungerSpeed [0.5] makes it half speed if anyone else feels the same

[Streetwind]

1 hour ago, Krougal said:

When you get your saturation levels full from a balanced diet, then your food meter doesn't go down so fast.

A balanced diet not affect hunger rate at all. It only gives you bonus HP.

[-Glue-]

I think its to incentivize cooking actual meals, and balance early game to be more difficult. One bowl of hearty meat stew can last you well over a full day before your hunger starts dropping. Whereas eating all those ingredients on their own wouldn't even fill you up. So cooking is really the only proper way to keep yourself fed.

[Krougal]

1 hour ago, Streetwind said:

A balanced diet not affect hunger rate at all. It only gives you bonus HP.

I thought it was from the saturation meters, is it only the main one?

[BigBadBeef]

5 hours ago, nip said:

Am I crazy or is the default hunger rate ridiculous?

Eating a stack of berries and 10+ steaks and every cattail I can get my hands on to barely not starve to death is very annoying.

I found out you can change it so that's nice, but I have no idea why its so fast in the first place.

 

You can tailor such settings to your liking if you wish, however if you try and do a real life comparisson - consider how active your character is. I bet you're just holding down the sprint bar button most of the time. That could be compared to a soldier IRL during combat operations.
 

Quote

 

Fun fact - militaries throughout the world are having profuse difficulties designing combat rations, because in certain cases, even 5000+ calorie ration packs were unable to keep a soldier adequately fueled during periods of exertion.

Now lets take into account what your character does throughout the day - basically running around all day (and all night) like a madman, throwing spears, swinging pickaxes, chopping trees. We could say that the level of activity is equivalent to a previously mentioned soldier during combat operations, thusly way, WAY over 5000 calories.

Now lets examine what your character eats and apply IRL figures to it. A portion of steak contains roughly 200 calories. 10 of these you come to a figure of roughly 2000. A fistful of berries is practically nothing, water and fruit sugars basically, lets say 20 cal, a stack of these is 1280 calories. A serving of cattail roots is 16 calories, and for it to equate an actual serving, you'd probably have to include several... like 4 or more.

Now lets put it all together
- 2000 from steaks
- 1280 from berries
- 40 from finding 10 cattails
= 3340 calories from needed 5000 MINIMUM.

 

 

What I'm trying to say is the game is going easy on you. Thank the developers for this small mercy, that they equated the food requirements to a rough average between sedentary and hyperactive levels of activity, otherwise those 10 steaks you wolfed down, they would have barely made a dent for breakfast.

[Streetwind]

1 hour ago, Krougal said:

I thought it was from the saturation meters, is it only the main one?

I'm not sure what you mean. None of the various meters' fill level affect your hunger rate. They never have.

You can see your current hunger rate by pressing C and looking at your stats. It defaults to 100%, or 130% if you're a Blackguard. Being outside in cold weather can add up to 25% extra. Holding an item in your offhand adds 20% extra. Wearing armor can add to it as well, depending on the exact items worn. But, feel free to try it out ingame - no matter what your satiety and nutrition bars are doing, the hunger rate will not change.

The only two exceptions to "everything obeys the hunger rate in the C menu" are: (1) if you are injured, you lose additional satiety while you regenerate health, independent of your hunger rate; and (2) if you eat a cooked claypot meal, you will not lose any satiety for a duration of 30 seconds for every 100 satiety the food was worth.

[Maelstrom]

Blackguard in full plate armor, dead of winter at night running around with a lantern during a temporal storm.  Hmmm... 225% hunger rate I think?  Good times, good times!

[Krougal]

54 minutes ago, Streetwind said:

(2) if you eat a cooked claypot meal, you will not lose any satiety for a duration of 30 seconds for every 100 satiety the food was worth.

Oh, I guess I had misinterpreted that or read bad info somewhere. That is what I was thinking of I.

[Apocalypse_Andy]

Satiation is broken in this game, you can survive all day on a handful of berries.  What do you do?  Wait until your hunger bar is flashing, then eat one berry.  For some reason the game thinks you've just had a full meal and you won't need to eat again for a few minutes.  Worried about filling your nutrition?  Don't worry, you can still fill up those bars like you were working hard on creating meals for yourself.

[Thorfinn]

I'm not sure it's so much broken as abusable. An undocumented feature that is very useful for learning the game.

It just takes the self control not to abuse it once you know the game well enough not to need it.

[EDIT]

The reason I don't think it's "broken" is that you do not build up your nutrition bars hardly at all, and early game, getting a few extra hit points is really important.

Edited October 16, 2024 by Thorfinn

[Krougal]

Is it really abusable though? I like the extra hp from filling the meters enough that it is worth the trouble to keep them all full anyway.

I am not really getting you guys either, so 1 berry acts as a meal and stops you from starving for a few minutes and....

It isn't like it is going to fill the meter up, does it last longer than if you ate a handful of berries at once? You've also got to keep eating every few minutes instead of once and being done with it for a while.

[LadyWYT]

On 10/14/2024 at 3:27 PM, Maelstrom said:

Blackguard in full plate armor, dead of winter at night running around with a lantern during a temporal storm.  Hmmm... 225% hunger rate I think?  Good times, good times!

Didn't know I was being watched--good times indeed!

On 10/14/2024 at 12:40 PM, -Glue- said:

I think its to incentivize cooking actual meals, and balance early game to be more difficult. One bowl of hearty meat stew can last you well over a full day before your hunger starts dropping. Whereas eating all those ingredients on their own wouldn't even fill you up. So cooking is really the only proper way to keep yourself fed.

This is my general assumption as well. You don't need to make a fancy meal to survive; berries, roots, and roast meat will keep you alive, and videogame logic usually pushes players to stick to the most convenient foods for efficiency. However, that kind of gameplay tends to get stale rather quickly, which can sour the rest of the game. Vintage Story handles it nicely by giving the players more reasons to opt for fancier foodstuffs and a varied diet, instead of just finding the easiest thing to get and sticking to that. A proper meal will have more satiation than the raw ingredients, and keep you from getting hungry as quickly. The varied diet will give you a bigger health pool to work with when it comes to surviving fights and accidents.

[Krougal]

My biggest gripe is why can't I mix pie fillings? Would be great to make a meat/cheese/veggie/berry pie. Granted no one would make anything else.

I started this time in a warm biome and honestly fruits and vegetables (not counting 2 proteins) seem hard to come by it's all protein and grain. Having the plant protein that doesn't rot quickly seems like it would be a great thing, except the need for large amounts of fat requires constant hunting animals anyway so meat is never an issue.

[Thorfinn]

35 minutes ago, Krougal said:

Is it really abusable though? I like the extra hp from filling the meters enough that it is worth the trouble to keep them all full anyway.

It is. Spend the first day filling your berry meter, and the second day you can get away with a handful of berries without losing much of your nutrition bar. Like the man said, wait until you take damage from hunger, eat one and only one of anything, and you can sprint for free for an hour or more. The only real downside is there's no healing.

Edited October 16, 2024 by Thorfinn

[Maelstrom]

16 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Didn't know I was being watched--good times indeed!

To quote an old commercial "You got peanut butter on my chocolate!"  

I was sharing out of my own preferable playstyle.  I tend toward the AC -10 type player build pictured below (courtesy of the players manual from Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord. (c) 1981  GREAT game!)

[Zane Mordien]

Once you get used to finding food, you shouldn't have any trouble at all. I play blackguard as well and food is never an issue. I don't use the starvation trick unless I'm playing snowball earth or something where there is very little food and then it is out of necessity and not to min/max my food usage. 

[Bumber]

On 10/16/2024 at 1:44 PM, Krougal said:

It isn't like it is going to fill the meter up, does it last longer than if you ate a handful of berries at once?

The hunger pause timer doesn't stack, which means you're missing out on the full hunger pause of every berry except the last one in the handful.

Does anyone know if the pause time is affected by hunger rate? Meals last entirely too long, which makes it difficult to top up nutrition. I tend to throw heavy armor on and run around, but I wonder if I'm wasting my time.

[Khornet]

On 10/14/2024 at 3:25 PM, nip said:

Am I crazy or is the default hunger rate ridiculous?

You're crazy.
I play Blackguard every time just because the extra hunger rate trait is such a non-issue. Securing food while sustaining yourself on berries and hunted meat in the first spring is really easy. Once you get farming going, you will have way too much food, that I just rot and compost.

[Krougal]

3 hours ago, Bumber said:

The hunger pause timer doesn't stack, which means you're missing out on the full hunger pause of every berry except the last one in the handful.

Does anyone know if the pause time is affected by hunger rate? Meals last entirely too long, which makes it difficult to top up nutrition. I tend to throw heavy armor on and run around, but I wonder if I'm wasting my time.

Yeah, I used to be crazy about topping myself back up with poultices from every scrape but it's an opportunity to eat more food.

It seems very erratic to me, but then it is supposed to be based on your activity level. 

[Blackbomber]

On 10/14/2024 at 7:32 PM, BigBadBeef said:

You can tailor such settings to your liking if you wish, however if you try and do a real life comparisson - consider how active your character is. I bet you're just holding down the sprint bar button most of the time. That could be compared to a soldier IRL during combat operations.
 

 

What I'm trying to say is the game is going easy on you. Thank the developers for this small mercy, that they equated the food requirements to a rough average between sedentary and hyperactive levels of activity, otherwise those 10 steaks you wolfed down, they would have barely made a dent for breakfast.

Uh no actually Im walking around trying to not starve to death all the time on normal hunger rate. I dont know how I could possibly have time too run around, mine or search for clay when Im searching for any remaining berry bushes or mushrooms in the woods while also trying to get fish which a fully cooked fish gives me a whole one bar of hunger back. All the while being on the absolute brink of starvation. 

Edited January 2 by Blackbomber

[LadyWYT]

10 hours ago, Blackbomber said:

Uh no actually Im walking around trying to not starve to death all the time on normal hunger rate. I dont know how I could possibly have time too run around, mine or search for clay when Im searching for any remaining berry bushes or mushrooms in the woods while also trying to get fish which a fully cooked fish gives me a whole one bar of hunger back. All the while being on the absolute brink of starvation. 

If you're struggling on the default rate, you might consider turning it down to a value you find more enjoyable. You can do so with the command /worldconfig playerHungerSpeed 1.0, where 1.0 is the default value. Make sure that you reload the world for the change to take effect.

Otherwise, I'd recommend hunting rabbits, pigs, or whatever other wildlife presents itself. As long as you're not a Blackguard, you should be able to dispatch a rabbit with a single flint spear, though you do need to have a good aim. Fish aren't terrible if you find a pond full of them, but otherwise you're likely going to burn more energy catching and cooking them(they will give more satiety when cooked) than you'll get from eating them(at least without proper fishing mechanics). Redmeat is much better, though even bushmeat is a better option compared to fish.

[BigBadBeef]

15 hours ago, Blackbomber said:

Uh no actually Im walking around trying to not starve to death all the time on normal hunger rate. I dont know how I could possibly have time too run around, mine or search for clay when Im searching for any remaining berry bushes or mushrooms in the woods while also trying to get fish which a fully cooked fish gives me a whole one bar of hunger back. All the while being on the absolute brink of starvation. 

If nothing else, this game adequately portrays the early hunter-gatherer phase prehistoric humans had to live through. They were too busy gathering food all day to ever have time for technological innovation.

Do yourself a favor and fight through it. It is so much more satisfying once you get far enough for your larder to start filling up. Once you push through that phase and reach food at least partial food security, the game takes on a whole new level and you will regret blowing through the early phases if you do.

[TJ Pepler]

Just throwing in a little 'food for thought' In medieval times laborers especially those involved in logging and mining would consume upwards of 5000 calories per day to perform their work.  The equivalent may be close to 10 average restaurant steaks per day.  Modern people eat significantly less at around 2000 for simplicity sake so, the problem is not the game, the game is accurate, the problem is our perception through modern eyes.  I imagine if such a situation could occur that a medieval logger could play Vintage Story they would see it as a very normal amount of consumption and have no issue