VanillaBryce Posted May 28 Report Posted May 28 (edited) Vintage story does a fantastic job of creating more immersive gameplay systems. Unfortunately, satiety functions in much the same way as Minecraft from the perspective of the player. There is nothing inherently wrong with the current system, because it is fairly in-depth for an arcade-type game... I honestly think it's great for the most part. However, the devs of Vintage Story are clearly aiming for more realism. How could satiety be improved? #1 Acknowledge that clean water is more important than food when it comes to survival. In real world survival situations, humans can survive for months on minimal calories so long as they have fat reserves. The same is not true for water. We must drink water every 72 hours or we will die. The gameplay loop should emphasize water consumption over food consumption. Players could be forced to boil water or find springs to drink from; else they risk a chance of contracting a serious illness from bad water. Cooking pots are fairly easy to make, and likely contain ~1-2 days worth of water, so this wouldn't be hugely burdensome. Rainwater could be collected and primitive gravity filters for unclean water could be produced to eliminate boiling requirements. This would have the benefit of reducing the forage/cooking grind that plagues survival games, while still emphasizing mindful play. #2 Seraphs should build body fat when they eat fatty and high-protein foods (mostly meat) or high-carb foods (when satiated) Food is still important, but satiated food consumption should allow the player to survive without food for days or weeks at a great cost if necessary by getting fat. Mild starvation should be the norm until the player is established, but it shouldn't just reduce player health until death - that should only occur in the latest stages. Every time the stamina bar reaches zero, the player should gain a point of starvation. Starvation could become a unique and immersive mechanic that imposes progressive and additive debuffs in stages before ultimately leading to death. These might look like: Stage 1: Reduced stamina regen and health regen Stage 2: Reduced maximum stamina Stage 3: Reduced resistance to cold Stage 4: Reduced maximum health. Stage 5: Max stamina degradation and max health degradation (until death) Realistically, 1-2 pieces of VS bushmeat (or their caloric equivalent) should be enough to stave of starvation for a day. This would have the benefit of making big game much more valuable to kill in the early game. A gameplay-balanced starvation progression might take 5 VS days if there were 5 stages, although 20-30 days would be more realistic. However, reducing starvation to a manageable level should take a long time as well. A fully starving player wouldn't have any body fat, so they would need to remain satiated for days to recover from starvation and rebuild their fat reserves. During this time, they would slowly progress back down the starvation ladder. Full recovery from stage 5 might take 10 VS days without hitting zero satiety - incentivizing players to avoid starving for too long. #3 The existing diet system could still be used, because more complex foods would readily increase body fat compared to raw meat, thereby extending progression time through starvation. Building fat by remaining satiated for a long period of time could extend each stage - perhaps from 1 VS day to 2 or 3? #4 To compensate for the lessened emphasis on constant food consumption, serious injuries could also require long recoveries and thoughtful medical attention. Meat is king when it comes to pure survival, but obtaining enough meat to stave off starvation is dangerous; this is why tribes were formed. For instance, a bite from a bear or a wolf (or a trampling from a moose) might break your limbs, causing reduced mobility or combat effectiveness for a long period of time - splints may be required. Perhaps, the player simply loses too much blood in the battle and their max health and stamina are reduced for a few days as they recover. This naturally incentivizes the player to hunt game cautiously, try their best to avoid predators, and emphasize developing safer forms of food production like farming (or crafting heartier meals) until they can stalk large prey with confidence after crafting more advanced weapons and armor. #5 Low-calorie foods (raw mushrooms, berries, veggies) could have their satiety reduced significantly, forcing the player to hunt for big satiety in the early game. Starvation mechanics would enable forage subsistence to be disincentivized further because you wouldn't start losing health immediately, but you would realize that it was unsustainable after a couple days. How do you think satiety could be improved? Should water be emphasized over food in VS? Do you think starvation should be expected and accepted as part of survival? Edited May 28 by VanillaBryce additional context 5
cjameshuff Posted May 28 Report Posted May 28 One thing that's been on my mind is tracking muscle mass and energy reserves separately. Build muscle for better damage output, mining speed, and reduced penalties from heavy armor. Build fat so you can go longer before your body starts consuming its muscle for energy, with penalties beyond a certain point. Recovery from deep starvation would require rebuilding muscle as well as fat. 2
VanillaBryce Posted May 28 Author Report Posted May 28 6 minutes ago, cjameshuff said: One thing that's been on my mind is tracking muscle mass and energy reserves separately. Build muscle for better damage output, mining speed, and reduced penalties from heavy armor. Build fat so you can go longer before your body starts consuming its muscle for energy, with penalties beyond a certain point. Recovery from deep starvation would require rebuilding muscle as well as fat. Yeah, I think some sort of body composition system could be super cool if it was done in a way that wasn't super grindy.
VanillaBryce Posted May 28 Author Report Posted May 28 (edited) I also think the default for the starvation system should be one day for free (as long as you aren't already starving). The first day with a zero satiety hit would put you in a deficit for day 2 (you'd have to eat double calories to be full), but you wouldn't gain starvation. In a five-point system (with one point per day of starvation), this would be a total of 6 days to reach the death phase. Edited May 28 by VanillaBryce
Rainbow Fresh Posted May 28 Report Posted May 28 I do agree that the current loop around survival's greatest (in a world where water doesn't matter) resource, food, is a bit lacking and scewed. In the early game it might work to achieve the wanted result, in the later game, when you have more food from a single farm harvest than you can reasonably eat before it spoils even with preservation, it just becomes a chore to constantly keep several servings of something on you just so you can slurp it like water. The reason I haven't made any armor in my world yet and instead just got addicted to bandages is because... you can heal damage back without losing too much satiety in the process. Wearing armor to not lose as much health in the first place drains your hunger even faster. I understand armor needs debuffs to balance it and that wearing around with several kilos of heavy metal on your body would make you exercise more, increasing hunger - but still, kinda just discouragingly bothersome. I also agree that it is a shame and an oversight the game has no need for hydration - it's why I consider the "Hydrate or Diedrate" mod a non-negotiable must-have for any world anyone ever wants me to player more than 10 minutes in. Though I guess these things are planned, considering the entire "warm" side of the world is lacking any meaningful content so far. You can freeze to death - but being in 50°C is perfectly fine. That said, I'm not sure your proposed approach to this system is the ideal solution either. You called the current system "fairly in-depth for an arcade-type game", meaning you don't see Vintage Story as a hardcore, no-fun-allowed survival struggle simulator but rather still as a game that game-ifies certain aspects for the sake of fun. Which is the greatest hurdle of balance in any type of game seeing as the innate nature of why games are a fun way to spend your limited free-time is because you can escape the burdens and hardships of reality, even if just temporary. Accusations of "a second full-time job levels of grinding" (not for Vintage Story per-se, just in general) come to mind. And atleast some of the aspects you mentioned feel like dragging things out a bit far. Lemme start with my biggest pain point: Your suggestion to the healing system. While, yes, slapping on a cloth with herbal toothpaste onto your gushing stabwound is overly game-ified, a painstakingly slow healing system would just detract from the game being played. 7 Days 2 Die, a zombie apocalypse block-game(-ish), has such a wound system. Fall a block too far? Have a potentially sprained ankle or even broken leg which now reduces, even with applied healing material (which only lessens effects and speeds up healing a bit) your walkspeed, aswell as damage on sprinting or jumping or (if broken) completely disabling these for up to a real-world hour. This is quite frustrating, and we are talking about a game where you can solve all your hostile, shambling problems with various big guns. Transpose this to Vintage Story and I can't imagine that resulting in a good time. Considering how often you fall down places. You'd spend half the game in a plaster with crutches, a game where you can barely outrun certain common threats to life with no debuffs and where getting things done quick in the available time of day and the remainder of non-winter seasons running all over the place, is the norm. A status effect system is in the works, or atleast planned, which could help add more flavor, danger and meaning to the moment. Like bleeding wounds that need a bandage to stop, infections that need medicine or something like that. But making every single scratch you take a potentially hour long waiting game? No thank you, I can go back to watching people suffer in "Minecrafts HARDEST (for the 5th time) modpack" videos for that experience. At that point, setting temporal gear respawns to infinite uses and just respawning yourself everytime you get handicapped will likely quickly become the new meta to play. Which is not a good meta to have. Now as for the actual rework hunger; a more complex hunger system seems in order. While the level of depth and detail to the tracked metrics like fat vs muscle and such might be a bit too much, having a hunger system that is more complex than "Bar goes down. Eat food. Bar full. Repeat indefinitely." is certainly in order. I like the idea of having gradual starvation aking to games like Rimworld or Project Zomboid. A counter-balance to just normal food consumption. When satiety is empty, starvation builds up which makes you gradually weaker until you die. Eating things then slowly recovers from that. It doesn't necessarily have to track body fat development but just having a slow secondary metric tied to hunger would do wonders. Reaching 0 satiety isn't immediately punished by damage, resulting in more satiety drain for healing in a self-reinforcing spiral towards death, but prolonged lack of sufficient sustenance is penalized harder. Starvation slowly goes away when satiety is kept above, lets say, 75%. Faster if your nutrition categories are balanced, much like your max health increasing with a balanced diet. Or maybe, to lean a bit more into realism, faster starvation recovery drains protein nutrition, much like health recovery drains satiety. And while I think that the imbalance between the eventual overencumbarance with available food versus the constant non-stop consumption of it should be tweaked too - I don't feel like the current food system as a whole supports that. It is theoretically realistic to require one hearty or two normal meals a day as a grown human adult, with some snack as necessary. So having a drain that equals a big meal replenishing about your entire 1500 satiety or two smaller ones with a berry snack inbetween, maybe, seems reasonably already. Food is just that constant of a chore for living creatures. And the non-immediate death when your stomach hits empty could alleviate that by reducing the immediate need to constantly eat non-stop as you can run on empty for a bit and then recover at home with a hearty feast for a couple days. But beyond that the entire balance we currently have would crumble. You said two pieces of bushmeat would realistically sustain you for a day (or atleast make you not starve). If we were to balance stuff around that, prepared meals with multiple ingredients would need a gigantic debuff. Which then removes the incentive, aside from "yummy dish" roleplay, to ever invest into proper meals when you can just kill a rabbit, cook it, eat it and call it a day. That would also mean that your average big gain animal would sustain you for several days, assuming you can preserve the meat that long. And suddenly the need to setup proper farming or animal husbandry is gone, as food is even more, even earlier abundant. So yeah, Tl;dr while I agree the current system feels lacking, I don't see an easy solution that wouldn't have the effect of using an axe fur surgery. 5
MKMoose Posted May 28 Report Posted May 28 (edited) 10 hours ago, VanillaBryce said: #1 Acknowledge that clean water is more important than food when it comes to survival. One thing that I think needs to be given enough consideration is that having to always carry water can easily end up even more boring than having to always carry food - while some juices and alcohols increase that variety somewhat, they cannot get even close to the variety that a culinary system can provide. It is worth noting that water content in food translate pretty much 1:1 to hydration, so it is possible (albeit rare in practice) to subsist on a diet of high-water foods with no additional water intake, especially when avoiding heat and physical exertion. Even foods with pretty average water content like cooked rice or beans still apparently have something like 60-70% water while providing ~100-140 kcal per 100 g, meaning that eating ~3000 kcal of them in a relatively high-calorie diet suitable for the seraph would provide you with ~1.5-2 L of water daily, drastically reducing the amount you need to drink separately. If you eat more vegetables and fruit or other high-water foods, then that can make it entirely viable to live with no additional water intake on top, though most people will also eat a lot of low-water foods. Naturally, separate water intake is more controllable and can be safer. I personally think, and I've seen quite a few people as well as at least one of the devs express similar sentiments, that thirst would likely be more fun as a nutrition-like hydration feature closely tied to heat and mostly limited to hot climates and the summer season, as a special challenge of sorts similar to how cold temperatures are generally limited to cold climates and the winter season. Regarding clean water, I have some doubts about how interesting it would be to actually engage with. One thing I will note, though, is that disincentivizing drinking water from random puddles may be a great way to increase the value of juice, alcohol and other drinks. 10 hours ago, VanillaBryce said: #2 Seraphs should build body fat when they eat fatty and high-protein foods (mostly meat) or high-carb foods (when satiated) #3 The existing diet system could still be used, because more complex foods would readily increase body fat compared to raw meat, thereby extending progression time through starvation. I remember saying somewhere that a sufficient way to improve the nutrition system would be to just add a nutrition-like fat mechanic, maybe sugar as well, and possibly to separate protein away from nutrition, in the extreme case ending up with a fat-sugar-protein trio of special nutrition-adjacent mechanics with completely unique effects caused by surplus and deficiency, as well as unique consumption mechanics. The primary concern with this kind of mechanic and many other suggestions is that it's just another stat to track, which can easily end up pretty boring. An arguably better alternative that I've thought of recently would be to split satiety into the three primary macronutrient types - carbohydrates, proteins and fats - which would all fit into the single satiety bar, applying various effects depending on how much of each the player has. This would inherently create a tradeoff between the choice of which macronutrient to prioritize at any given time, since the total of the three macronutrients would all fit under a single maximum, making this system potentially much more interesting than just keeping a few extra bars at a high enough level. An additional improvement coming from changes like this could be that late-game large-scale food production wouldn't be going largely to waste, and instead food quantity itself could function similarly to current nutrition - the player may be able to survive on a smaller quantity of food than currently required, but eating more in the long term could provide various buffs. I'm ultimately unsure of what the best solutions might be here, mainly because they are closely tied to the intended gameplay experience, the intended level of realism, the food sources implemented in-game, and a multitude of other factors. Either way, somethingg to introduce more meaningful differences between food categories and make starvation less binary could be very useful in the long term. 10 hours ago, VanillaBryce said: #4 To compensate for the lessened emphasis on constant food consumption, serious injuries could also require long recoveries and thoughtful medical attention. The main potential problem here is that injuries go well beyond the scope of the initial encounter. If the player were to take a week of debuffs to recover from a seemingly minor encounter with a wild animal, then that can easily feel dispropotionate or unfair. It would require a whole number of concurrent changes to many fundamental systems in the game, including death, entity AI, health and damage balancing, damage mitigation in combat, movement and/or world generation changes to mitigate excessive risks of fall damage, kind of just everything. Most of these would be changes that I would actually be very interested to see, but I frankly doubt that the devs have much interest in this kind of work. 10 hours ago, VanillaBryce said: #5 Low-calorie foods (raw mushrooms, berries, veggies) could have their satiety reduced significantly, forcing the player to hunt for big satiety in the early game. While I do somewhat agree with the idea, I don't really see the premise or goal. Why should subsistence on gathering be disincentivized and hunting forced? Foraging shouldn't be completely sufficient all the way into the endgame, that much is natural, but I would actually argue that gathering should be a fundamental part of the game supplementing other sources of food with additional variety that can't be easily obtained from farming. While foraging wouldn't be something particularly efficient, I do think that it should be reliable, to create a balance where the player could survive easily once they get a minimum grasp on the basics (keeping the game more approachable and reducing frustration with death spirals), but would be incentivized to invest in other food sources to reduce the overall time spent on food, increase the time that can be spent between meals, and overall gain more time for other activities, creating a better sense of progression. Edited May 28 by MKMoose 3
LadyWYT Posted May 28 Report Posted May 28 I have a hunch that hydration and advanced hunger mechanics are in the works, and it's worth noting that Tyron already had a rudimentary fat mechanic coded into the game but left unimplemented. That being said, to implement such things, a status effect system would be almost mandatory. 11 hours ago, VanillaBryce said: Yeah, I think some sort of body composition system could be super cool if it was done in a way that wasn't super grindy. The problem is that this kind of system is going to be grindy by default--even moreso with how Vintage Story is balanced(the fat mechanic mentioned above took around six days of good eating to replenish one day's worth of lost fat, if I recall correctly). The player doesn't get much of anything for free. Things like fat reserves are going to be most useful at the start of the game, when the player is actually struggling to stay fed, but given the player's past was rather harsh it's not likely they'll have fat reserves to work with. Of course, that could be handwaved since it's a videogame, but it's worth pointing out that securing a food supply is one of the most critical tasks in the game. If the player can't handle something as basic as securing a food supply, they're out of luck for most everything else. One of the major challenges of the game is also preserving enough food for the winter(assuming appropriate climate); if the hunger system is "realistic" and the player takes months to starve to death, then there's not much incentive to bother with food preservation. The player could be inflicted with debuffs as they starve, but this can also easily result in a very slow, painful death since they may become too weak to actually recover from their situation--not a very fun experience. If such effects persist through death then it can softlock the player out of playing the game and require console intervention/world reroll to fix, and if the effects don't persist through death then we're back to the player being able to ignore food preservation and supply almost entirely. I do agree that the game needs tougher healing mechanics, but I also don't think that kind of thing is a solution to the hunger problem. Tougher healing mechanics should be implemented to fix the overly simple system that currently exists, while tougher hunger mechanics should be implemented to actively make it harder for the player to secure a food supply. As it stands, it's easy to get more food than you could ever eat just by a little farming, or even exclusively hunting and foraging. I will also note that if you want more in-depth hunger mechanics, there are a couple mods that do that. Expanded Stomach adds a pretty in-depth system, but it's also fairly grindy...though that can be configured. Max's Simple Starvation is a simpler implementation of the same concept. Don't try to use both at once though, as there does seem to be some incompatibilities. 2 hours ago, MKMoose said: I'm ultimately unsure of what the best solutions might be here, mainly because they are closely tied to the intended gameplay experience, the intended level of realism, the food sources implemented in-game, and a multitude of other factors. Either way, somethingg to introduce more meaningful differences between food categories and make starvation less binary could be very useful in the long term. I think macronutrients is a little far, really, at least for most things. I think it's fair that, if there's a muscle mechanic, to ask the player to maintain a certain level of protein intake to actually build and maintain muscle mass. Likewise, if there's a fat mechanic, it's probably fair to assign different "calories" to different foods, meaning that the player can run into issues if they decide to eat nothing but desserts/heavy meals or fail to build much fat if they eat primarily vegetarian. Sims 4 had a pretty decent system for this: the character needed to partake in specific activities to lose weight and/or build muscle, and different foods had different calories meaning that some could pack on pounds a lot faster than others. That being said...it's really tough to balance stuff like this for Vintage Story. A friend and I have been doing just that, and we've ended up tossing a good handful of ideas that sounded good on paper but weren't actually fun to play with in practice. 2 hours ago, MKMoose said: I personally think, and I've seen quite a few people as well as at least one of the devs express similar sentiments, that thirst would likely be more fun as a nutrition-like hydration feature closely tied to heat and mostly limited to hot climates and the summer season, as a special challenge of sorts similar to how cold temperatures are generally limited to cold climates and the winter season. Regarding clean water, I have some doubts about how interesting it would be to actually engage with. One thing I will note, though, is that disincentivizing drinking water from random puddles may be a great way to increase the value of juice, alcohol and other drinks. Thirst mechanics do make the game interesting, and I think needing to find clean water to avoid getting certain sicknesses would be a decent goal. However, I'm also rather skeptical of thirst mechanics being a good addition to the game, since I think many players might find such a thing too similar to the hunger mechanics and not enjoy that much micromanagement. We'll see though. 2
VanillaBryce Posted May 29 Author Report Posted May 29 Man, I'm glad I made this thread because this generated some interesting discussion. This is going to take a while to hash out.
VanillaBryce Posted May 29 Author Report Posted May 29 19 hours ago, Rainbow Fresh said: I also agree that it is a shame and an oversight the game has no need for hydration - it's why I consider the "Hydrate or Diedrate" mod a non-negotiable must-have for any world anyone ever wants me to player more than 10 minutes in. Though I guess these things are planned, considering the entire "warm" side of the world is lacking any meaningful content so far. You can freeze to death - but being in 50°C is perfectly fine. Hydrate or Diedrate is a great mod and I agree that some form of hydration system could be a good way to make the equatorial regions more unique if they required the player to pay more attention to their hydration. 19 hours ago, Rainbow Fresh said: That said, I'm not sure your proposed approach to this system is the ideal solution either. You called the current system "fairly in-depth for an arcade-type game", meaning you don't see Vintage Story as a hardcore, no-fun-allowed survival struggle simulator but rather still as a game that game-ifies certain aspects for the sake of fun. Which is the greatest hurdle of balance in any type of game seeing as the innate nature of why games are a fun way to spend your limited free-time is because you can escape the burdens and hardships of reality, even if just temporary. Accusations of "a second full-time job levels of grinding" (not for Vintage Story per-se, just in general) come to mind. And atleast some of the aspects you mentioned feel like dragging things out a bit far. Vintage Story is an arcade-type game, but it also flirts with a more hardcore or "realistic" experience across several mechanics. However, the food mechanics are more arcade-y by design to allow players to cook more complex meals without feeling like they've wasted time. There's nothing wrong with this, but it feels noticeably incongruous with the more realistic direction the other major mechanics have gone in. I also used the word "should" a lot in the main post because I was feeling lazy. I don't believe the hydration+starvation+injury system that I proposed is the perfect remedy for the gamification of satiety. Moreover, the gameplay loop for food is a common sore point across many survival games - as you mentioned. With that said, I think it is possible to make a system that is gamified, but more in-depth than the current system without being overly grindy. For my part, I'm definitely personally biased against being forced to eat in games arbitrarily; I have lived and worked very actively without eating all the time or eating particularly well. It's just always been one of my pet peeves when it comes to survival games, because it doesn't usually add much to the game and the hunger bar feels tacked on to make it "survival-y." It seems kind of ridiculous that running around a field causes you to start dying in a game once your hunger bar hits zero. The forced progression to "better food" is also far too predictable and that ends up making it a bit boring even if the cooking, baking, and prep mechanics are done well.
LadyWYT Posted May 29 Report Posted May 29 48 minutes ago, VanillaBryce said: Moreover, the gameplay loop for food is a common sore point across many survival games - as you mentioned. With that said, I think it is possible to make a system that is gamified, but more in-depth than the current system without being overly grindy. For my part, I'm definitely personally biased against being forced to eat in games arbitrarily; I have lived and worked very actively without eating all the time or eating particularly well. It's just always been one of my pet peeves when it comes to survival games, because it doesn't usually add much to the game and the hunger bar feels tacked on to make it "survival-y." It seems kind of ridiculous that running around a field causes you to start dying in a game once your hunger bar hits zero. The forced progression to "better food" is also far too predictable and that ends up making it a bit boring even if the cooking, baking, and prep mechanics are done well. To ramble about some of the design process for the Expanded Stomach mod, @Teh Pizza Lady and I ended up opting for a system that allowed the player to burn off a percentage of body fat to avoid starvation damage, at the cost of taking all the avoided damage at once if they hit the limit without eating a good meal(full 1500 points) to reset the counter. This design allows the player to go a little longer between meals or burn off some excess fat quickly if needed, while still pushing the player to establish a good food supply and preserve food for the winter months. I could see a similar system working for the vanilla game, potentially, though certainly with some tweaks. Instead of draining health as soon as the player runs out of satiety, the player could be locked out of part of their health pool--say, 2 HP--if they didn't get enough to eat(requires a set minimum daily calorie intake). That doesn't sound like much, but it adds up pretty fast, and is compounded further by the player's health pool shrinking from nutrition loss. To unlock the health points, the player needs to be well fed for that day; unlocking multiple days' worth of HP will require several good meals. Going without enough food for multiple days in a row can impose negative related status effects, such as reduced movement speed, reduced work speed, and reduced attacks. Dying will remove any starvation-related status effects and halve the value of the locked HP, but comes at the cost of a "resurrection sickness" penalty to discourage players from ignoring food and relying on regular deaths to clear unwanted effects. Overall, the system allows players to go a little longer between meals as needed, while punishing those who slip into the bad habit of assuming food is entirely optional. 1
VanillaBryce Posted May 29 Author Report Posted May 29 13 hours ago, MKMoose said: One thing that I think needs to be given enough consideration is that having to always carry water can easily end up even more boring than having to always carry food - while some juices and alcohols increase that variety somewhat, they cannot get even close to the variety that a culinary system can provide. It is worth noting that water content in food translate pretty much 1:1 to hydration, so it is possible (albeit rare in practice) to subsist on a diet of high-water foods with no additional water intake, especially when avoiding heat and physical exertion. Even foods with pretty average water content like cooked rice or beans still apparently have something like 60-70% water while providing ~100-140 kcal per 100 g, meaning that eating ~3000 kcal of them in a relatively high-calorie diet suitable for the seraph would provide you with ~1.5-2 L of water daily, drastically reducing the amount you need to drink separately. If you eat more vegetables and fruit or other high-water foods, then that can make it entirely viable to live with no additional water intake on top, though most people will also eat a lot of low-water foods. Naturally, separate water intake is more controllable and can be safer. I personally think, and I've seen quite a few people as well as at least one of the devs express similar sentiments, that thirst would likely be more fun as a nutrition-like hydration feature closely tied to heat and mostly limited to hot climates and the summer season, as a special challenge of sorts similar to how cold temperatures are generally limited to cold climates and the winter season. I partially agree with a lot of your points here. Great feedback! Prioritizing hydration over food could lead to many of the same engagement issues that are created by the current food system. This could be compounded by the lack of drink variety compared to foods. However, food is still very important. My main point was that you don't need to think about food as constantly as hydration when it comes to survival. I think Valheim's 3-food system actually does a good job of balancing engagement, progression, and grind. Moreover, eating 3 meals per in-game day makes logical sense. With that said, their 'meals' include several drinks. The system is probably a bit too arcade-y for Vintage story, despite being executed very well. A hydration system related to heat and tied to a 3-meal/day food system (with some nutrient buff logic) could strike a good balance. 13 hours ago, MKMoose said: An arguably better alternative that I've thought of recently would be to split satiety into the three primary macronutrient types - carbohydrates, proteins and fats - which would all fit into the single satiety bar, applying various effects depending on how much of each the player has. This would inherently create a tradeoff between the choice of which macronutrient to prioritize at any given time, since the total of the three macronutrients would all fit under a single maximum, making this system potentially much more interesting than just keeping a few extra bars at a high enough level. An additional improvement coming from changes like this could be that late-game large-scale food production wouldn't be going largely to waste, and instead food quantity itself could function similarly to current nutrition - the player may be able to survive on a smaller quantity of food than currently required, but eating more in the long term could provide various buffs This reminds me a lot of the Valheim system, haha. I think a macro system could be viable in Vintage Story without being too grindy for this reason. Shaping your diet for buffs over time would be fun as well - it might also change your playstyle based on the environment, which could be interesting. 13 hours ago, MKMoose said: The main potential problem here is that injuries go well beyond the scope of the initial encounter. If the player were to take a week of debuffs to recover from a seemingly minor encounter with a wild animal, then that can easily feel dispropotionate or unfair. It would require a whole number of concurrent changes to many fundamental systems in the game, including death, entity AI, health and damage balancing, damage mitigation in combat, movement and/or world generation changes to mitigate excessive risks of fall damage, kind of just everything. Most of these would be changes that I would actually be very interested to see, but I frankly doubt that the devs have much interest in this kind of work. I agree that severe injuries could really detract from the fun of the game. Striking the right balance would be important, but it has been done well before. The fallout games come to mind. They made it pretty hard to become crippled, so when it happened it was challenging, but rarely infuriating. It seems to me that Vintage Story wants to depart from its arcade-y Minecraft roots; thoughtfully implemented, consequential injuries would certainly take it more into the true survival realm. Entities would need to be adjusted to account for the mechanic, but that can be done. Bears could have a high chance to stop and warn players before attacking - even though this isn't our world, they would likely understand that humans/Seraphs are a dangerous predator. Wolves and pigs could be scripted to have a high chance to avoid players if alone, but attack if in a pack. Leaves could be scripted to reduce fall damage/slow the player. This would make the game feel much more alive, and a bit of rng could go a long way to creating more immersive wildlife encounters. 13 hours ago, MKMoose said: While I do somewhat agree with the idea, I don't really see the premise or goal. Why should subsistence on gathering be disincentivized and hunting forced? Foraging shouldn't be completely sufficient all the way into the endgame, that much is natural, but I would actually argue that gathering should be a fundamental part of the game supplementing other sources of food with additional variety that can't be easily obtained from farming. While foraging wouldn't be something particularly efficient, I do think that it should be reliable, to create a balance where the player could survive easily once they get a minimum grasp on the basics (keeping the game more approachable and reducing frustration with death spirals), but would be incentivized to invest in other food sources to reduce the overall time spent on food, increase the time that can be spent between meals, and overall gain more time for other activities, creating a better sense of progression. The issue with subsistence is that it is just that; it is barely sufficient to maintain life. This is why people began pursuing husbandry and farming as opposed to hunting and gathering. Hunting was energy intensive, but rewarded high energy foods... Gathering kept you from starving to death while you were spending tons of energy hunting. The game already adopts this logic, but raw game is nerfed heavily because it is abundant and nerfing it incentivizes players to advance to more complex foods. Foraging can and should still be important, but meat could be buffed a bit.
Archadria2 Posted May 29 Report Posted May 29 Have you considered food's giving attribute buffs other than just health. Bushmeat could help how fast you aim your bow or spear (buffs please they suck now) Red meat could help you swing your weapon's faster. Grains could help with speed of tool use. -dropdown bread -dropdown porridge Dairy could help with fruits could help with -dropdown berry, ect
Rainbow Fresh Posted May 29 Report Posted May 29 (edited) 3 hours ago, VanillaBryce said: Vintage Story is an arcade-type game, but it also flirts with a more hardcore or "realistic" experience across several mechanics. However, the food mechanics are more arcade-y by design to allow players to cook more complex meals without feeling like they've wasted time. There's nothing wrong with this, but it feels noticeably incongruous with the more realistic direction the other major mechanics have gone in. I also used the word "should" a lot in the main post because I was feeling lazy. I don't believe the hydration+starvation+injury system that I proposed is the perfect remedy for the gamification of satiety. Moreover, the gameplay loop for food is a common sore point across many survival games - as you mentioned. With that said, I think it is possible to make a system that is gamified, but more in-depth than the current system without being overly grindy. Oh, I wholly agree that the hunger system could certainly need a little bit of... something, for sure. It sticks out like a sore thumb, being the neglected child between all the other food related mechanics. You gotta learn basic agriculture and do crop rotations and utilize fertilizers and check the right seasonal temperatures to grow you crops. You bake a simple pie in a multi-step in-world interactive process and cook meals of over-sold variety. You have to carefully care about preservation as all the food in the world is worthless if it rots before you can eat it. Yet eating itself is just holding RMB every couple minutes to turn an item into a bit more green bar. The nutrition categories, while a nice and reasonably "realistic" mechanic, don't really matter too much. However making things more realistic is a hard to balance. The need or atleast incentive for progress is a core mechanic of games. Hence why Vintage Story is currently centered around telling you to "go plant crops and cook proper meals, everything else is ineffective". The fun of games centered around progression, like Open World Survival games are, lies in overcoming challenges. Not starving, in the early game, is a challenge. Berries can do that if you find enough around but screw you over in the winter because not berries, and no preservation, means no food. Hunting can supplement that but is also heavily nerfed during winter. Unlocking the power of proper meals (more food for your food) and preservation (through literal preservation tactics like sealed crocks or just harvesting long-living grains) makes you overcome that challenge. It feels good to the beginner player to finally evolve from "surviving" to "thriving" where they don't need to worry about where to get enough food for the next days. That said, this is where the train currently stops. After that point, that challenge turns into tedium, because you constantly have to just follow the same cycle of cook, preserve, eat eat eat. There is not much more to it. Sure you can experiement with the advertised thousand of possible "dishes" (ingredient combinations resulting in unique names) for the fun of it, and even install mods like Culinary Artillery to add even more dishes but eventually you reach the point where that tedium becomes annoying and the only viable food is the most effective one, the one that makes you have to eat the least with the least constant preparation effort. That's why a more engaging, more meaningful and more forgiving hunger system is a good idea. The reason why I am not natively a fan of a body-fat mechanic is because I played Project Zomboid, which had exactly that mechanic. Project Zomboid does separate "hunger" (how empty your stomach is aka. how much you can eat right now, what makes you not drop dead right now) and nutrition (what your body actually processes and makes you not drop dead long term). Including all the under- and overweigth effects. The gripe I have with PZ's system is that it also, ultimately, falls short and turns into a way too limiting grind. We can blame the game's balance for that but the chosen system as a whole pronounces that fact. I played a world where my goal was to set up "ad infinitum" survival conditions. I.e. setup my world in a way where I can reasonably say that my character would not die by any causes other than old age, because I provided means to get all resources needed for survival renewably. The problem is, in terms of food that quickly highlighted a problem: Most renewable foods aren't sustainable alone. PZ has this very indepth cooking system that allows you to make pretty complex dishes and such but at the end of the day a whopping two food options remained that could actually, reasonably, sustain you long term - one of which was modded in. Hunting rabbits (as only source of non-fish meat in V41, cause fish suck) and watermelons. You can have a giant greenhouse with the finest crops growing and would still eventually die of malnutrition, because you cannot physically eat enough salad to sustain your weight. The only renewable food source that gives enough bang for your buck is "hunting" (trapping, really) rabbits. If Vintage Story would choose a similar approach to modeling food intake, I fear we would also reach a point where 90% of food options in the game become "Might as well not exist", because the minmaxed management of your body's fat value becomes the only concern. Hence why I suggested a simpler system that still allows for more depth and leeway than the current hunger system but also doesn't interfere with limiting food options. Simply displacing the dreaded green bar as the sole ground truth for living or dying in terms of sustenance goes a long way already. With the simple addition of gradual starvation through a status effect system - hell, maybe even expanding the other way too and adding positive buffs for being a healthy noodle - food management gets more forgiving while still retaining the core princinples of "you eat or you die". And because we don't specifically consider food types more than necessary, the late-game player is not locked out of half of the game's food because they are "simply not worth it". Tweak the general satiety values of everything in the game a bit to balance it around "You are going to barely fighting off starvation for as along as you just live off of berries, mushrooms and chicken" to retain the strong incentive for progressing into the age of cooking, aggriculture and husbandry. 2 hours ago, VanillaBryce said: Prioritizing hydration over food could lead to many of the same engagement issues that are created by the current food system. This could be compounded by the lack of drink variety compared to foods. However, food is still very important. My main point was that you don't need to think about food as constantly as hydration when it comes to survival. I think Valheim's 3-food system actually does a good job of balancing engagement, progression, and grind. Moreover, eating 3 meals per in-game day makes logical sense. With that said, their 'meals' include several drinks. The system is probably a bit too arcade-y for Vintage story, despite being executed very well. A hydration system related to heat and tied to a 3-meal/day food system (with some nutrient buff logic) could strike a good balance. While I am not necessarily saying the base game needs all of Hydrate or Diedrate, the way the mod currently implements the system is great imo and has so far avoided the tedium of just another constant food intake. The need for water is present, but it has never really been an issue outside of hot climate regions for me. With many common foods in the game giving some hydration aswell, needing to specifically drink is only really a concern every couple meals. Or when you are out and about for too long living off of low-water foods. Efficient foods (like porridge) get more disincentived by actually draining hydration, as are long-term preserved foods (curing/pickling) to balance later game management. Drinking any random water source is disincentivised by untreated water giving you a nutrition/hunger debuff or salt water essentially killing you and mid - late-game options for building wells, collecting rainwater and building water pumps help procure safe water in your home environment without having to constantly boil it. Because water can be stacked in a container unlike prepared meals, inventory need for having water on you is overall less than food's even within the mod's self-enforced limit of only carrying max 4L of liquid on you or you get slowed down bad. So I think this easily proves a hydration system can be added to the game without making the current hunger system situation worse. 1 hour ago, Archadria2 said: Have you considered food's giving attribute buffs other than just health. Bushmeat could help how fast you aim your bow or spear (buffs please they suck now) Red meat could help you swing your weapon's faster. Grains could help with speed of tool use. -dropdown bread -dropdown porridge Dairy could help with fruits could help with -dropdown berry, ect That is an even more game-ified solution to a problem prefaced with "The current system is too game-ified and lacking". It also doesn't really solve the core issue. From a gameplay perspective giving unique buffs to unique foods is a widely used solution to make the player vary their diet instead of just relying on "the best dish" all the time. But from a depth and realism stand point it makes no sense. Why would bushmeat specifically give you buff X and red meat buff Y? Why would any of these give these specific buffs to begin with? Vintage Story itself isn't centered around a numeric skill system so just buffing "a stat" when you consume a specific item feels really out of place. It's a slightly different story when heavy armor slows you down and makes you more hungry, because that makes sense. It also does not address the core issue of the mundane, constant consumption of food being the end-all of the hunger system as a whole. Edited May 29 by Rainbow Fresh 1
LadyWYT Posted May 29 Report Posted May 29 5 hours ago, Archadria2 said: Have you considered food's giving attribute buffs other than just health. Bushmeat could help how fast you aim your bow or spear (buffs please they suck now) Red meat could help you swing your weapon's faster. Grains could help with speed of tool use. -dropdown bread -dropdown porridge Dairy could help with fruits could help with -dropdown berry, ect Welcome to the forums! Valheim uses this system, and I hate it. In my experience, all it really accomplishes is shoehorning the player into only eating the same couple of meals to get the maximum buffs for whatever it is they're doing, and if the player doesn't have easy access to whatever the best option is there are going to be complaints about getting stuck with a suboptimal option. With the current system in Vintage Story though, there are some minor differences in food, such as redmeat being more filling than other protein options and cranberries being less satisfying but spoiling at a slower rate. However, the player can vary their diet as much or as little as they want. Want to cook something unique for each day of the week? You can do that! Want to subsist on nothing but turnips and meat pies? You can do that too! Do you just absolutely love blueberry pie for some reason and want to make that a staple? You can do that and not get punished for it! Regarding bushmeat, the lower satiety value is, I believe, meant to demonstrate that the meat is tough and general unpalatable for a meal, as well as meant to push the player to be picky about what they hunt. Otherwise, you end up with players just relying on bear pits, wolves, and small animals like foxes and raccoons that are plentiful and easily caught. 1
cjameshuff Posted June 1 Report Posted June 1 An expansion of my thoughts: Split health into "muscle" and "fat", and add "hydration". Muscle mass is essentially the sum of the current nutrition bars, fat is built by eating high-energy foods. Separate food satiety into nutrition and energy (fats/carbs). Muscle reduces armor penalties, increases mining speeds and weapon damage, and increases health. Fat counters these benefits. Muscle mass tracks the sum of the nutrition bars, but these change more slowly than fat, making it easier to maintain a balanced diet. Fat decreases when hungry or with heavy activity, and when it reaches zero, your body resorts to consuming muscle mass (decreasing the nutrition bars evenly). Starvation sets in as muscle gets consumed. Max health decreases, healing stops below some level, and eventually you start taking damage. High-calorie travel food could be carried to maintain fat reserves on expeditions without greatly impacting nutrition and thus muscle mass, but long term it would lead to nutrition issues. Meals can be skipped, expending fat reserves without actually starving, but regular hydration is needed instead.
Heegrim Posted Thursday at 06:50 PM Report Posted Thursday at 06:50 PM The starvation mechanic definitely needs to be fleshed out more. Being able to just slap bandaids on your grumbling tummy to heal starvation damage makes no sense. If a hydration system is implemented, there should definitely be a ‘trusty’ water skin item that you automatically drink from to avoid the constantly having to stop and hold right-click to drink every 5 mins. Dehydration should be a debuff status effect rather than another bar to fill. I think how many meals a day you need to eat should be adjusted too (especially if we also have to drink water). Being a blackguard and just running around outside during winter causes me to have to eat multiple pots full of food a day to avoid starving. 1
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