Default Hunger Rate Issue

[Saturn Tiberian]

Vintage Story has an absurd model of prehistoric food.

Meat yields of large animals are extremely inaccurate. A single deer realistically contains about 50lbs of harvestable meat. In the game you receive barely enough bushmeat for a couple bars of hunger. The dried meat that was a staple of prehistoric human diets is almost entirely useless.

A rabbit has 3-4lbs of meat(2,300-3,000kcal), in-game it gives you one bar of hunger. If we look at my in game character's hunger rate (depleting the entire 15 tick hungerbar in approx. 1 in game day standing literally entirely still and AFK), this would give a TDEE of 30,000-45,000kcal, roughly equivalent to an African elephant.

Prehistoric humans could survive on the caloric content of rabbits so long that a form of nutrient deprivation known as "rabbit starvation" could set in. I encourage you to try and survive on only rabbit meat for months on end in-game. They give you a single bar of hunger and you will have to chase or shoot them with arrows since you cannot construct snares or traps. Very "realistic"!

On 1/2/2026 at 3:59 PM, TJ Pepler said:

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

 

This 5000 calorie diet would correspond to around 3lbs of bread, or two loaves. How many loaves do you have to eat in game?

I am not a stickler for realism in games. They are meant to be interesting and fun above all else. But it is a pet peeve of mine when "realistic" games make straightforward tasks difficult or annoying. Your prehistorical ancestors literally chased animals all day on foot until they passed out from exhaustion and clubbed them for food (the "you hold the sprint button" argument refuted). But in the game you can barely survive on a vast quantity of food while walking everywhere and barely doing anything.

Edited January 6 by Saturn Tiberian

[tinyoverflow]

I can't really say anything about how realistic the consumption is in terms of numbers, as the game is quite abstract about it. Satiety is not directly related to kcal, I think.

You're absolutely right with the bread. It's kinda ridiculus that you have to consume 5 loafs of bread (yielding 300 sat each) to fill your hunger bar. Despite that, it's not that unrealistic. A good meal can fill you up a lot. If done right, it nearly fills your whole bar without many ingredients.

With meals, I think it's pretty OK. Just like breakfast, probably lunch (depending on how much you do) and dinner. I'd be really upset in reallife if I only had one meal a day, too. Personally, it doesn't bother me that much.

Edited January 6 by tinyoverflow

[Saturn Tiberian]

Satiety should be related to kcal at least a little if they want it to be realistic, body weight and starvation is pretty straightforwardly derived from calories in and calories out. Having the food sources give different "areas" like meat, plants etc. is good but I would split it into macronutrients (protein/fat/carb) instead of plant/bread/etc to model agricultural nutrient deprivation (lack of animal nutrients) and rabbit starvation (lack of fat).

Personally I think they should make food sources more valuable but scarcer. A prehistoric human would travel a fairly large area, maybe hitting a berry bush they know about, an animal trail, a trap, a river, etc. Having the player travel a larger area between food sources (which you could mark on your map, each of which would satiate them for at least a day) would model this while also encouraging exploration and a more "nomadic" playstyle. I should be able to ignore food for a day or two and go hog wild on berries or a deer and be fine. Then when you start doing agriculture you can build up a more stationary base.

4 hours ago, tinyoverflow said:

With meals, I think it's pretty OK. Just like breakfast, probably lunch (depending on how much you do) and dinner. I'd be really upset in reallife if I only had one meal a day, too. Personally, it doesn't bother me that much.

This is probably formed by your eating habits. If you eat 3 meals a day your body will adapt to it vs. one meal a day. it's not like a hunter gatherer was eating a steady breakfast lunch and dinner

[LadyWYT]

1 hour ago, Saturn Tiberian said:

Satiety should be related to kcal at least a little if they want it to be realistic, body weight and starvation is pretty straightforwardly derived from calories in and calories out. Having the food sources give different "areas" like meat, plants etc. is good but I would split it into macronutrients (protein/fat/carb) instead of plant/bread/etc to model agricultural nutrient deprivation (lack of animal nutrients) and rabbit starvation (lack of fat).

There actually was a mod that tried to do something like this, however, it's long been defunct(and never played nicely with any mods remotely touching food/hunger): https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/10343

It was an interesting concept, but the main problems I found were that not only did it make most of the game absolutely trivial, but there was no penalty for just stuffing yourself silly. If I'm not mistaken, there were debuffs that would eventually occur and persist after death if the player went long enough without food...but the issue there is that if the player somehow managed to starve that much, then they're likely going to get stuck in a cruel death loop and need to start over from scratch. Essentially, the debuffs prevent the player from hunting enough food to recover, however, if the debuffs are reset on death then the player doesn't really have much incentive to bother with food since they can go so long before death occurs.

The current system might not be the most realistic, but that simple challenge gives the player something to account for throughout the game. Winter is coming? You'll need to store food. Doing chores around the base? You need to make sure you have enough to eat, or else you'll have to drop what you're doing to go find some groceries. Traveling far from home? There's only so much you can efficiently carry and use, so you'll probably need to stop and replenish your supplies from time to time.

Macronutrients are already covered by the nutrition bars. An extra bit of health doesn't sound like much, until you wind up dead from a fight you would have survived otherwise if you had that extra health. The extra health is also more critical on difficulties like Wilderness Survival, as the starting health pool is smaller than normal. I don't really think it's a good idea to add debuffs for missing nutrients either, as while it may be realistic there are some that just cannot be obtained until later in the game(dairy).

1 hour ago, Saturn Tiberian said:

Personally I think they should make food sources more valuable but scarcer.

Maybe, but the problem here is that the world ends up feeling empty, and the player has less to do. Realistically a single deer can feed one person for a couple of weeks, but keep in mind that a couple of weeks in-game equates to about two months. All the player has to do is go on a couple of hunting trips per year and they're set. 

As for the world feeling empty, a lack of wildlife is bad enough, but a lack of berry bushes, mushrooms, and other edibles just makes it worse. 

I will note that while food is an "easy challenge" in the game, it's also a challenge that many players, particularly newer ones, struggle with, and it's not really unusual for a few of those players to starve to death. Don't ask me how, I don't know, but that suggests to me that the system balance is working as intended. I don't think the early game should be made easier, but I also don't think it should be made that much harder either, as that tends to be the portion that makes or breaks the game for brand new players. 

Overall, more difficult hunger mechanics are really best left to the modded realm.

[Saturn Tiberian]

2 hours ago, sushieater said:

They didn't. Chasing after faster animals is pointless. Your prehistorical ancestors employed traps (e.g. chasing animals into pit traps or into cliffs) or ambushed animals.

A wide variety of animals engaged in persistence hunting (chasing faster prey to exhaustion), including early humans. Of course more efficient methods were preferred if they had the option.

Quote

Low-tech agriculture and mining requires huge amounts of energy expenditure.

Which would be more than provided for by a full-grown deer... unless the player character has the metabolism of a blue whale. And why does my character go from fully satiated to literally dying after sitting still for a day without food? You can't rationalize this one with "realism", it's actually very unrealistic.

Quote

In game food is all about balancing. IMO, it's in a decent spot, when comes to realism vs time spent acquiring resources.

Now the "muh realism" cope is sidelined, we can mobilize the "balance" cope. The game wouldn't be "balanced" if the player could stockpile decent quantities of necessary resources through hunting-gathering. He must be constantly forced to drop what he is doing to gather food until he acquires agriculture because:

Quote

Hunting is far too easy/far less time consuming compared to the real world. So scaling the hunting rewards accordingly downwards is very reasonable.

Hunting in the real world was far less time consuming than early agriculture. Hunter-gatherers had better access to nutrition than their early agricultural descendants. They didn't switch over to agriculture for ease or convenience, they did so because it provided a higher density of caloric energy in a given area, which allowed a larger population to grow, which could then outnumber and militarily dominate their neighbors.

Interestingly, the Neolithic corresponds with the extinction of the Neanderthal species. Neanderthals were taller and better suited for hunter-gathering, however, they reproduced slower than their Homo sapiens counterparts, who were victorious not because their lifestyle was objectively beneficial to their health and well-being, but because they could outnumber their enemies. And thus they replaced their enemies. I will avoid relating this to modern politics.

Edited January 6 by Saturn Tiberian

[regex]

One thing I've noticed is that if you change the month length it also changes the growing time for all plants. This means I spend a whole lot more time foraging for food while starting up agriculture. Meanwhile, decay rates and hunger stay the same. Makes me wonder if adjusting the hunger rate is the answer, especially because I find it fairly absurd as well (although much more reasonable as a game mechanic because it drives action rather than inaction).

Edited January 6 by regex

[tinyoverflow]

7 hours ago, regex said:

it also changes the growing time for all plants

Yes, it will change the growing time accordingly. But also it should increase their yield according to their growing time. I've read that somewhere, but haven't tested it myself, so please take this with a grain of salt.

[Krago]

I absolutely detest cooking in games, so I adjusted the settings to effectively turn hunger off.  Adjust the default level to whatever suits your gaming preference.

[LadyWYT]

9 hours ago, tinyoverflow said:

Yes, it will change the growing time accordingly. But also it should increase their yield according to their growing time.

Changing the month length will adjust the growth time of crops accordingly, but the yield will remain the same. Thus if the player increases month length, they'll want to be planting bigger farms.

[regex]

11 hours ago, tinyoverflow said:

Yes, it will change the growing time accordingly. But also it should increase their yield according to their growing time.

This is not the case, the yields remain the same (with 12 day months I should see 33% more yield, not so).

tbh I'm thinking of moving the hunger rate to 75% but in my 9 day save I had enormous amounts of surplus by year 2, so I don't really know, still in year 0 of the new save. A big test will be winter, which will be ~9 to 12 days longer and with a "normal" amount of food.

[tinyoverflow]

2 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Changing the month length will adjust the growth time of crops accordingly, but the yield will remain the same.

Thanks! I wasn't absolutely sure regarding this one (as mentioned)