Eating A Varied Diet Should Extend the Hunger Pause From Meals

[williams_482]

It's pretty common on here or Reddit to see someone lobby for a mechanic that encourages eating a more varied diet not just in terms of nutrition categories (which is already reasonably well encouraged) but specific food items. They want a mechanical reason to eat more than redmeat-turnip stew and redcurrant pie, a combination that will safely max out the four easy nutrition bars indefinitely.

There's a mod out there which adds a "novelty bar" that the player can fill up over time by eating a wider range of different foods, and gives rather substantial bonuses to damage and mining speed when maxed out. This does provide the right incentive, but it has two problems: 

1. It doesn't just encourage you to vary your diet, but gives you a specific target for variety that you have to hit and keep hitting. For some players this is a fun little minigame, but for many it is more like a chore. 

2. The bonuses are substantial. +35% damage and +20% mining speed? That's a big deal! But of course it has to be, or the effort gone through to maximize dietary variety wouldn't seem worth the incremental gains. 

Instead of having a progress bar to fill out and gain a benefit largely unrelated to the meals themselves, how about we just make meals with more novel foods more effective at being meals? There's no longer a specific target to hit and the effects are subtle, but there's still an incentive there for players to mix things up a bit. Mechanically, I'd suggest something like this:

Currently (according to the wiki) meals pause the hunger bar for 30 seconds for each 100 saturation consumed. For a simple implementation I would cut that substantially by default, 10 seconds per 100 sat, plus an additional 0-20 seconds per 100 sat calculated from the percentage of the previous n (1,000? 5,000? not sure) saturation points consumed which came from this same ingredient. This formula would be set to give benefit for any ingredient that makes up less than 25% of recently consumed food, scaling linearly such that an ingredient which made up 25% or more of recent meals would give zero variety benefit, 24% would give a very slight additional benefit, and 0% would give the full benefit. 

So for example, if you eat hefty carrot soup for the very first time, that 600 sat would pause your hunger bar for 60 seconds baseline, plus another 120 seconds for novelty to reach the same 180 second pause you get from eating this food in vanilla right now. If carrots made up 12.5% of your recent meals, then you would get the baseline 60 seconds plus another 90 seconds for novelty. If at least 25% of your diet is carrots, another hefty carrot soup will only give you the baseline 60 second pause. Etc, etc. 

I would want these numbers set at a level where frequently consumed redmeat-cabbage stew becomes a worse travel food than a novel but less saturation-dense meat-veggie stew, but not enough to make that redmeat-cabbage stew useless for long distance travel. 

Also note that this will have a minimal effect on the early game, because that "past foods" bar will be empty at the start of the game and only slowly fill up as the player eats. If they scrape through the first day on mushrooms and berries but cook up a nice fish stew on May 2nd, that first few servings of fish stew will have the same hunger pause as they would in vanilla right now. 

The criteria for novelty could be made more complicated in many different ways if desired. For example, food could be grouped into subcategories (mushrooms, root vegetables, etc) such that occasionally eating any mushrooms at all will get you a significant benefit over just eating carrots, onions, and turnips, but eating many different kinds of mushrooms gives only a marginal bonus over eating just the one type plus other veggies. Meal types could have novelty benefits beyond just their ingredients, which would have to be carefully tuned because there are so few meals to begin with (soup, veggie stew, meat stew, porridge, pie, jam). This could have interesting effects, like encouraging players to subsist on less efficient meals while preparing for a large journey when they'll need their most nutritionally dense options to be as effective as possible. There is also opportunity to make currently unfavored foodstuffs more prominent. For example, maybe alcohol could have a disproportionate effect on the recently consumed food tracker, giving you a reason to get wine drunk in the cellar the night before embarking on a journey. Etc, etc.

If this were implemented I would want the current hunger bar pause of any given meal to be listed along side it's saturation value, but I would not want any of the recently consumed food trackers to be directly visible to the player. I explicitly don't want to give players a new bar to track how perfectly they are varying their diet. Instead, the goal is to make novel foods mechanically more effective in a subtle but meaningful way, without giving an explicit target to min/max against.