Suggestion about the hunger mechanics and death that follows.

[Zee Meyer]

Hey everyone,

I’ve been thinking about the hunger system a bit. It makes sense that hunger goes down pretty fast, it keeps the pressure on and fits the survival theme. But it feels strange that you die so fast once your hunger hits zero.

From what I know (please correct me if I’m wrong), humans can survive around three weeks without food, depending on the situation. So instant death feels pretty unrealistic, especially since Vintage Story usually leans into being logical and grounded.

I think it would make more sense if, when your hunger runs out, there’s a countdown over a few days where your health or strength slowly drops. Maybe each day you get weaker, slower, or start losing health until you eventually die if you still don’t find food. It would keep the urgency without feeling so sudden, and would match the more realistic survival vibe the game already has.

Just wanted to throw the idea out there and see what others think

[LadyWYT]

Welcome to the forums!

While it's true that one can survive a few weeks without food in real life, this is one of those cases where realism doesn't make for very fun gameplay. That ticking health bar is meant to motivate you to find food, quickly, or else you'll die and have to recover lost ground. If it took much longer for the player to die, food would pretty much never be a concern(and to be far, unless one really cranked up the difficulty food isn't much of a problem by default) as you could just wait for berries to ripen or crops to mature instead of needing to forage. Of course, one could also skip farming entirely at that point and just forage every once in a great while.

4 hours ago, Zee Meyer said:

I think it would make more sense if, when your hunger runs out, there’s a countdown over a few days where your health or strength slowly drops. Maybe each day you get weaker, slower, or start losing health until you eventually die if you still don’t find food. It would keep the urgency without feeling so sudden, and would match the more realistic survival vibe the game already has.

Perhaps a fair exchange for slowing down death from starvation. However, the more you weaken the harder it is to fix your situation, and at some point you're too weak to have a chance of fsecuring food but death is still a bit far away. Now granted, one shouldn't be reaching that point in the first place, but it's possible that inexperienced players might end up in that situation. While realistic, I don't see it being very fun at all. Of course, you could make the debuffs less harsh, but I feel like that would actively encourage players to just ignore food even more. The only way I really see a system like this working is if you impose harsh penalties up front for missing meals, and have a requirement of the player staying well-fed for a certain length of time to reduce/remove any incurred penalties.

In any case, I think the system we have in place already does its job very well. On standard settings, food is something that the player will need to keep an eye on, but not so much of a concern that it will be the thing that dominates most of their gameplay(save for perhaps the early game). For players that don't really want to worry as much about that mechanic, the hunger rate can be turned down so that starvation is even less of a concern.

[CodenamVenom]

Hey, also new here.

What if instead of debuffs for not eating, you got buffs for eating and have them get better when having a varied diet?
As far as I'm aware, being really new at the game, on one end you can die from not eating and on the other end your health increases from eating a bit of everything. What if eating protein made you hit harder? Maybe eating vegetables could make you faster.

Just and idea that I think would reward you for eating and not just punish you from not eating.