Food variety - existing and great but not incentivized. Let's change that!

[Kulze]

Currently the game has several hundred thousand combinations, which is great... but let's be real here, players generally only use a few and stick with them, making it 'nice to have' but giving no incentive beyond the caloric differences and a HP buff for nutrition types which can easily be interchanged, ultimately leading to a few specific recipes being permanently used on repetition without a reason to divert from it.

So my suggestion here: A randomized buff system for meals.
This system is one I fondly remember from 'Wurm Online/Wurm Unlimited', though there it was tied to a skill exp buff specifically.

How does it function?
An seed based on player ID and ID's specified for a food combination. This allows a RNG to set a unique effect only for that player.

What effects could be included?
A variety, whatever can come up with.
Armor boost, resistance to temporal stability, regeneration speed for temporal stability, health regen (mild), health boost, a 'strength' buff doing more damage, optimally specifically tied to a specific weapon made out of a specific material to increase the pool and so on.

Want it to be more variety even?
The system can also have a RNG attached to effectiveness. A baseline value and adjusting the power of the buff +/- 50% from baseline, hence even when finding a fitting combination of a meal for the specific effect... what would another one do? After all it could be better still.

That would be such a hassle to keep track of!
True, which leads to a follow-up directly. The 'recipe book'. A character specific part of the handbook which can be searched by effect, every recipe being initially hidden until it is consumed once. That 2 red meat stew for the first meal in a pot? Now it's listed with the effect and power of it.

This would substantially increase the incentive - without enforcing to do it - for food variety. It would also elevate the farming of crops which usually aren't accessible in the base-area, as well as foraging for mushrooms becoming a overall positive. And since food is handled via a table simply for the combination ID there's a lot of upward space for variety possible in the future as well as auto-inclusion for every mod-based added consumed item as it introduces a layer of depth to the otherwise fantastic food variety in the game, removing people from endlessly consuming pie and nothing else day in and out.

[LadyWYT]

I mean...I don't know about anyone else, but eating the same thing all the time gets a little stale, so I'll change what I'm cooking from time to time--it doesn't really need any buffs attached to it. Likewise, I don't think it's really a bad thing if players decide they want to maximize efficiency and only eat redmeat-turnip stew and berry pies, or if they decide they just really love blueberry pie and want that to be the backbone of their diet. 

40 minutes ago, Kulze said:

Want it to be more variety even?
The system can also have a RNG attached to effectiveness. A baseline value and adjusting the power of the buff +/- 50% from baseline, hence even when finding a fitting combination of a meal for the specific effect... what would another one do? After all it could be better still.

The problem with RNG is that if the player isn't getting consistent buff strengths, then they're going to end up getting frustrated when one meal provides a really good buff and then cooking the same meal sometime later gives a weaker version of the buff. And of course, if specific ingredients are required for specific buffs, then you end up with frustrated players when they can't get the buffs they want because they don't have access to the ingredients they need.

 

42 minutes ago, Kulze said:

This would substantially increase the incentive - without enforcing to do it - for food variety. It would also elevate the farming of crops which usually aren't accessible in the base-area, as well as foraging for mushrooms becoming a overall positive. And since food is handled via a table simply for the combination ID there's a lot of upward space for variety possible in the future as well as auto-inclusion for every mod-based added consumed item as it introduces a layer of depth to the otherwise fantastic food variety in the game, removing people from endlessly consuming pie and nothing else day in and out.

With all due respect, I don't see how this really improves on the current system or doesn't force players into very specific diets. It sounds similar to Valheim's food system, where eating different foods provides different levels of health and stamina--you eat whatever is appropriate for the job you intend to be doing. The drawback to Valheim's food system though is that you get forced into eating the same things all the time, because some foods are drastically better than others so if you don't eat them, you're effectively hamstringing yourself. There's no point to eating roast boar, venison stew, or queen's jam anymore when you have serpent stew, wolf kabobs, and onion soup, since the latter provide significantly more benefit.

In the context of Vintage Story, you get shoehorned into always eating specific meals for specific tasks, so if you wanted to eat a redmeat pie before going fishing that's just too bad if some other meal offers a more appropriate buff; you could still eat the pie of course, but you're just not going to be able to do the task as effectively as you would by eating the proper meal. Other issues that arise are the fact that you can't just eat whenever you want--you need to be hungry first, which also means that you can't just switch buffs on a whim. Likewise, there's also the question of what happens when the player can only eat part of a meal, but not the full thing.

[Kulze]

Ah, I think the part about the RNG for effectiveness has been badly communicated by me here.

What I meant with it is not a change in effectiveness every time you use it, it's a difference in effectiveness 'per recipe'.
So we imagine 'stew with 2 red meat' provides a movement speed increase, 5% baseline value (as example) for that one... but it only provides 3% as it rolled bad.
On the other hand 'carrot pie' does provide 7% movement speed. Same buff different effect.

This incentivizes trying out new combinations even when you've found a fitting recipe, be it for a better effect or to get a more simple one with it.

I agree with you 100% that simply randomized effect effectiveness would feel bad, that's not a fun mechanic. RNG exists to provide variance where variance matters, not to ruin your day with a sudden low roll.

 

1 hour ago, LadyWYT said:

With all due respect, I don't see how this really improves on the current system or doesn't force players into very specific diets.

I recommend looking up the food system in 'Wurm Online' in that case for a better showcase then my simple description here.

As for why exactly it does provide a upside:

- Since it's not a fixed system but based on the character, hence causing a different seed to be generated every time you play any new world will cause the 'search' for proper recipes anew. This means while when you've found a fitting recipe for a specific task you'll focus on that one that during the search process you need to gather a variety of ingredients which increases the different created recipes quite a lot rather then focusing on one permanent method staying always the same.

- Once again, since the seed is different for every character this has especially in MP a vast effect, permanently. As every single player has their respective buff at other recipes it causes the cook of an inn for example to need to store a vastly larger variety of consumables, there alone it provides a substantial upside.

- Many players generally lean towards making pie as time goes on. It allows meat and vegetables to be included as well as improving the nutrition of flax grains - which are otherwise very bad - substantially. If that results in a awful buff out of bad luck though then it's likely to gravitate to something else.

- Depending on which buffs are used it can have significant effects long-term. Usually players lean to a single food-type in non-combat situations (and many even otherwise since they don't bother) which can be counteracted. Mining/Digging speed increase with a specific food? When terraforming you absolutely want that, even if the recipe for it is not the most easiest to achieve. Damage reduction before a temporal storm? Absolutely so. Movement speed when going for exploration? Can help quite a lot to reduce time needed for travel. Damage buff for your currently used weapon? Before spelunking or doing one of the story areas it's definitely a major upside. And so on and so forth.

This is specifically to NOT cause a inherent 'this food is automatically better then any other'. Quite the contrary. When 'solved' it still does push for a MUCH higher variety then currently seen, especially if one wants to maximize effects, hence having to deal with nutrition first and the buff secondly.
 

1 hour ago, LadyWYT said:

so if you wanted to eat a redmeat pie before going fishing that's just too bad if some other meal offers a more appropriate buff; you could still eat the pie of course, but you're just not going to be able to do the task as effectively as you would by eating the proper meal.

Plainly spoken: So?
It's a incentive, obviously you want to make use of incentives. But they're not mandatory to achieve your goal, you can forego it.
You don't need to quenching/tempering... you can absolutely do without! But doing so will increase your results as you get either more use-time out of an item or it does the job better. It needs time and material though... also got a risk attached to it but that's to uphold material balance at large for a non-renewable resource that's usually acquired under mediocre danger (dark caves have drifters after all).

So you either got the right stuff and are happy... you take care to get it as you wanna be effective... or you forego it as it's not feasable or you simply can't be bothered. The options are absolutely open.
 

1 hour ago, LadyWYT said:

Other issues that arise are the fact that you can't just eat whenever you want--you need to be hungry first, which also means that you can't just switch buffs on a whim. Likewise, there's also the question of what happens when the player can only eat part of a meal, but not the full thing.

Yes, that's a good question, absolutely so!

The first: Food management, if you want to be buffed then handle it properly, a non-mandatory but rewarding usage of not being stuffed to the gills non-stop.
The second: Reduction of the time a buff applies. The buff duration can be directly connected to caloric intake simple, this makes it universal an application for any type of food. So cooked bushmeat while not providing much satiation will if you eat enough to fill you up nonetheless provide the respective buff accordingly. You don't get penalized for using it, and also not rewarded. This makes finding appropriate buffs for higher caloric food still good though and doesn't punish using those despite not being able to consume it in full.


In summary:
It's a system which simply adds another layer of choice.
You can forego making a choice, which is more then fine! You either get no effect at all which is useful... or best-case you get a 'lucky hit' anyway as a side-effect.
But for everyone who does try to make an active choice it rewards to put in the effort. This is managing your satiety before doing tasks, doing things to reduce your satiety which isn't affected in-between, hence giving an extra incentive to do those before doing something more 'grand' of any kind... and it does reward you accordingly for putting in the effort.

[LadyWYT]

9 minutes ago, Kulze said:

What I meant with it is not a change in effectiveness every time you use it, it's a difference in effectiveness 'per recipe'.
So we imagine 'stew with 2 red meat' provides a movement speed increase, 5% baseline value (as example) for that one... but it only provides 3% as it rolled bad.
On the other hand 'carrot pie' does provide 7% movement speed. Same buff different effect.

This incentivizes trying out new combinations even when you've found a fitting recipe, be it for a better effect or to get a more simple one with it.

Yeah, I'm still not getting it. What I see is that sure, the combinations might technically be different, but ultimately it's just a more complicated numbers game of figuring out which ingredients give the best value and then sticking exclusively to that recipe. Not to mention that the player can roll poorly when they cook the meal and thus not get the full benefit--this is already a feature of the quenching system when the workpiece snaps thanks to rolling poorly, and players are already frustrated with that. I can't imagine them being thrilled about getting a sub-par benefit just because RNG decided they botched cooking a meal.

 

13 minutes ago, Kulze said:

'Wurm Online'

To be perfectly honest, I've never played that game and don't know much about it, and the explanation attempts I have seen about its mechanics don't make me keen on playing something like it.

 

15 minutes ago, Kulze said:

Since it's not a fixed system but based on the character, hence causing a different seed to be generated every time you play any new world will cause the 'search' for proper recipes anew. This means while when you've found a fitting recipe for a specific task you'll focus on that one that during the search process you need to gather a variety of ingredients which increases the different created recipes quite a lot rather then focusing on one permanent method staying always the same.

This right here is an absolute NO. Not only is it going to be a massive pain in the rear to have to figure out all the recipes every single time I start a new world, but that's also going to make it very difficult to answer questions that newer players might have about food since there's just no way to know what's attached to what. I can't say that meat pie is the best food for fighting if it gives a strength bonus in one world but a stability bonus in another. 

I also like to pick out my own character's personal preferences--that's a major part of the fun of roleplaying! Choice of diet can say a lot about a character, and if the game is the one deciding what the character does and doesn't like, then it's not really me getting to write a character anymore, as much as it is just being handed a premade character sheet to play.

24 minutes ago, Kulze said:

Plainly spoken: So?
It's a incentive, obviously you want to make use of incentives. But they're not mandatory to achieve your goal, you can forego it.
You don't need to quenching/tempering... you can absolutely do without! But doing so will increase your results as you get either more use-time out of an item or it does the job better. It needs time and material though... also got a risk attached to it but that's to uphold material balance at large for a non-renewable resource that's usually acquired under mediocre danger (dark caves have drifters after all).

So you either got the right stuff and are happy... you take care to get it as you wanna be effective... or you forego it as it's not feasable or you simply can't be bothered. The options are absolutely open.

Unless you deliberately crank up the hunger rate, or otherwise wear armor/carry stuff in your off-hand to crank up the hunger rate...the player doesn't really eat that many meals a day. And if the meals are giving distinct buffs to various activities, players are absolutely going to want those buffs, and get upset when they can't switch buffs because they aren't hungry. It's why Valheim had the bukeperry item--to allow players to reset their food benefits as needed rather than needing to wait several minutes for the buff to wear off so they could eat something else. That's not even getting into what such a system is going to inflict on players who decide to turn the hunger rate down...that's going to cause all kinds of frustration.

Yes, Vintage Story does require some planning in advance, but use of consumables to get buffs shouldn't be something that requires advance planning. It should be something you're able to do on the spot as long as you have the appropriate item.

35 minutes ago, Kulze said:

So cooked bushmeat while not providing much satiation will if you eat enough to fill you up nonetheless provide the respective buff accordingly. You don't get penalized for using it, and also not rewarded.

There seems to be conflicting information here. I'm guess the idea is that the player can keep eating cooked bushmeat even if they aren't hungry and still get the associated benefit, but with a shorter timer? If that is the case, what ends up happening is players will just be constantly snacking in order to get buffs, without any real penalty for habitual overeating.

 

39 minutes ago, Kulze said:

This is managing your satiety before doing tasks, doing things to reduce your satiety which isn't affected in-between, hence giving an extra incentive to do those before doing something more 'grand' of any kind...

Given that Vintage Story is currently weighted toward pushing the player to stay well-fed and manage their activities carefully to avoid burning precious calories...I don't think it's a good idea to push players into doing things like running around in plate armor or hurting themselves to burn off hunger just because they want to stack/switch buffs. The various hunger penalties exist so that the player isn't just using the off-hand as a free inventory slot or otherwise running around in a full suit of plate for maximum protection.

[Rainbow Fresh]

As someone whose current in-game diet consist of spelt porridge with boiled onion - all day, every day, because those are the P and N crops I grow next to Flax as K - Having some sort of incentive to juggle around varying crops of carying effectiveness would be nice. Because sure, I could just go and plant something else; but these two are the easiest/fastest to grow so I don't have to babysit my farm when out on an adventure for, like, 10 days and I get nothing other than imaginary culinary variety for it.

That said, the proposed solution doesn't sound any better. As was already mentione and discussed before, relying on RNG to bring the player to do something is never a good fit. It was already mentioned how the nature of randomizing effects per player per world would lead to confusion, tedium and frustration while on the other hand just even moreso spearheading the one min-max recipe at the end of a long trial-and-error run - but I want to point out that there is another aspect to it: Unavailability. The current food system has 5 nutrition categories. While fruit might be the most underdeveloped as it's 90% berry bushes which only exist in a certain climate, all other categories have variety suited for different parts of the world. Multiple versions of grain and veggies that can grow in a variety of hotter and colder climates. Protein from animals or fish is obtainable in basically all livable parts of the world. As are animal options that can produce dairy. If we now randomize effects, it can easily happen that the player finally finds the optimal buff recipe just to realize it requires ingredients they can literally not produce in their home area. What do you do then? Move your entire existence built up over 100+ hours? Hope a convenient translocator network takes you to "free, easy farmland" where you can spend a year overharvesting so you have 3 years worth of ingredients? That doesn't sound like a good solution to incentivise experimenting more with different recipes. Not to mention the current implementation of cooking doesn't even allow this as there are technically only, like, 5 recipes - the name is just generated from the used ingredients. At the end it's all stew, soup, porridge or variety of pie.

 

If we wanted to forcibly make the player choose different foods, a wear-off effect might be a better approach. Eat the same food over and over again and it just becomes less and less effective; following the same logic of "Bushmeat gives less nutrition to emulate it being very, very unpalatable" the character would just "grow tired of eating the same dish 10 times in a row". However, I don't see this helping either cause then people just rotate two dishes over and over again. Make the cooldown harder and it becomes unreasonably unfavorable for beginner players that don't have access to reliable variety yet; which brings up the discussion of "survival vs. comfort". VS is a wilderness survival experience. If your very survival against starvation banks you eating any available food, would you really rather die than eat the same vegetable mash 10 times in a row? And if we say "Oh well, just apply it to established players" - how would one measure that. How do we define a clear line that separates the "eat anything starving survivalist" from the "well established homeowner" who wouldn't want to eat like a pleb anymore? So yeah, not really a solid approach either.

[Kulze]

8 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

but ultimately it's just a more complicated numbers game of figuring out which ingredients give the best value and then sticking exclusively to that recipe.

Currently it's 'Pick that ONE recipe which is easiest'.
The difference is that at minimum then it is 'Pick the SEVERAL recipes which are easiest'.

I would argue that's an improvement to the existing situation in pushing people to use variety rather then a single dish over and over.
 

8 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Not only is it going to be a massive pain in the rear to have to figure out all the recipes every single time I start a new world, but that's also going to make it very difficult to answer questions that newer players might have about food since there's just no way to know what's attached to what

This is a friction mechanic with a reward at the end.
The recipe finding is the friction.
The reward is the buff.

That's how incentive systems work, you gotta put in effort to get result, they don't just get thrown at you inherently.

As for answering new players:
The explanation: 'Every food you consume has a buff attached, they're unique for your character what you get. Test around!'
Because that's precisely what it is, a system that pushes experimentation instead of mindless repetition with a pre-solved equation you can simply look up.
 

8 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

I also like to pick out my own character's personal preferences

That's a fair point, but also not.
Have you ever 'chosen' to like specific things in life? I didn't, I like them because that's what I'm simply. Nobody 'chooses' to like or dislike specific foods, that's not in your control anyway.

And even if we say 'I wanna choose it'. Sure! No issue there! But that's a follow-up thing and not baseline for the system. Another one on top which allows re-rolling the buff type something gives... or even target a specific one. Obviously powerful to target things like that and hence necessary to be respectively bothersome to set up, but absolutely possible.
 

8 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

That's not even getting into what such a system is going to inflict on players who decide to turn the hunger rate down

Automatically applied multiplier according to baseline hunger rate changes.
So someone with 25% hunger rate gets 4 times the result per calory.

Also another metric which can be chosen during world-gen or changed with a command simply.
Don't see an issue there.
 

8 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

I'm guess the idea is that the player can keep eating cooked bushmeat even if they aren't hungry

Nope.
You need calories you get the buff. Otherwise not. Overeating is not a thing.
 

8 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

I don't think it's a good idea to push players into doing things like running around in plate armor or hurting themselves to burn off hunger just because they want to stack/switch buffs.

The VAST majority of players I see playing are regularly reaching starvation, it's not a 'I need to burn extra colaries' thing. It's further incentive to keep track of the hunger bar simply, with positive effects for doing so instead of the absolute miniscule starvation damage and annoyance of the sound you get.

And your examples also absolutely don't reflect the reality of the VS situation.
You wanna tell me it would push people into 'randomly running around to burn calories'? That's plainly spoken not a thing. Sure... someone can do that but to what effect? You waste time, you do nothing, it is wasteful and boring, and the system doesn't even incentivize doing THAT.
What it does incentivize though is proper preparation for specific tasks which are included inside the system, hence making them more effective... but not necessitating it.

So what to do in the meanwhile?
How about pottery? Grass collecting? Harvesting? Cooking? Sorting through your storage? Sifting? Smithing? Building? As a few examples which make no sense to be reasonably affected by the buff-range anyway.
 

6 hours ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

relying on RNG to bring the player to do something is never a good fit.

RNG is a tool, not a menace. Any system based on RNG is a luck-based system by design obviously. You can have a great outcome right away, or not.
What RNG in such a case provides is variety, hence making playthroughs feel substantially different.
Also the scale of the RNG used in this case isn't supposed to be massive anyway, hence a 'nice to have' but not a 'must do it' aspect. Incentive plain and simple. Not necessity. That's important to take into consideration.

If your argument would uphold then this would mean ruins should also have static and fixed loot without any variance, because that also is RNG, and it also 'brings the player to do something', namely searching for more then a single instance of a specific type of ruin.
 

6 hours ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

The current food system has 5 nutrition categories.

The current food system has also several HUNDRED THOUSAND combinations. I think if you use AI it gives you 360000 options the system as total?
If we take this number at face value then even if we seed it with 60 different buff options (which is a quite decent amount I would say) it still leads to 6000 combinations providing you with your specific buff result, only increasing with every single mod introducing consumables providing nutrition on top of that, as well as every single addition of variety for food creation in the future.

This leads to a relatively easy (but not inconsequential) find of a buff, allowing you to have the upsides relatively early on, even if infrequent.
Min-max though does lead to larger-scale experimentation and:

7 hours ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

Unavailability

Exactly this part becoming a challenge to overcome and not something to universally ignore.

Once again a difference in SP and MP here.
For MP it pushes to spread out over respective distances and improving trade relations. Those turnips and those peanuts suddenly have relevancy outside of 'they're a source in this area'.
For SP it does primarily work in favor of long-term worlds with exploration focus. Yes, finding those translocator routes and actually connecting them with easily traversible options makes suddenly sense outside of 'I get teleported into material I searched for out of sheer luck'.
 

7 hours ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

the nature of randomizing effects per player per world would lead to confusion, tedium and frustration

The same argument is once again easily applicable to ruin loot.
Is the variety in ruin loot leading to confusion, tedium and frustration for not finding the things you desire in the first you find? Or is it an incentive?

Friction is not an enemy to defeat, it's a thing to manage. Friction is an obstacle to overcome, properly designed friction causes a feeling of success. A feeling of success is literally fun.
Any game which has no barriers to overcome is not used as it provides no fun, that's a universal rule. Even in idle-games overcoming hurdles is to increase returns by spending the least amount of time possible... or to overcome the sheer amount of needed time to reach the results one wants. Time is the hurdle to overcome hence.

So no, that's as a universal argument also not reasonable to make.
 

7 hours ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

What do you do then? Move your entire existence built up over 100+ hours? Hope a convenient translocator network takes you to "free, easy farmland" where you can spend a year overharvesting so you have 3 years worth of ingredients? That doesn't sound like a good solution to incentivise experimenting more with different recipes.

Whichever you think best? You're already providing literally multiple options which cause a decision-making tree which puts the player into a position to think about their actions forward.
Make a second base. Either give up the former one or connect them.
Search actively for translocators and make them accessible if leading into a positive direction, incentivizing infrastructure to be built and hence increasing the scale of what can be done before becoming solely 'vanity' for creativity's sake.

I really don't see how that wouldn't incentivize it, quite the contrary from what you state there even. There's clearly a LOT of different types of incentive in that part alone.
 

7 hours ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

Not to mention the current implementation of cooking doesn't even allow this as there are technically only, like, 5 recipes - the name is just generated from the used ingredients. At the end it's all stew, soup, porridge or variety of pie.

Well... and how do you think the system decides on said name?
There is a system hence available which discerns between '2 pieces of red meat' and '3 pieces of red meat' stew already. So each of them is for the system 'a separate entity'.
You don't make 'stew with x calories and x nutrients' simply... you make a 'hearty red meat stew' which tells you precisely how many items and which materials have been used. Hence 4 items, all red meat, hence creating the respective nutrients nd the calories from it as the system tracks the input to a degree this way.

The addition of attaching a randomized buff to the generated name-tag is really not such a big thing.
 

7 hours ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

Eat the same food over and over again and it just becomes less and less effective;

As much as I know this has been shot down already, and for a very viable reason as well:
The start is when you're struggling for calories, so a system PUNISHING (the opposite of incentive) would cause by far more tedium and frustration then any incentive system ever could do. Not to speak of it being unfeasable and enforcing very early-game hunting without protection to be done which leads to a rise in player deaths and ultimately the frustrations spiking out of control leaving to quitting the game entirely.
 

7 hours ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

I don't see this helping either cause then people just rotate two dishes over and over again

So, no help to increase it from 'one dish' to 'two dishes'? That's a 100% increase in variety over the existing situation already.
Have 10 viable buff options available one could reasonable want and you increase it to 'ten dishes'.

What's the exact viable cutoff point for variety numerically? 2? 5? 10? 100? 1000?
 

7 hours ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

which brings up the discussion of "survival vs. comfort". VS is a wilderness survival experience. If your very survival against starvation banks you eating any available food, would you really rather die than eat the same vegetable mash 10 times in a row?

VS starts off as a survival wilderness experience.
It turns into a homesteading experience though over the duration of the game, is also a exploration game on top of that.

You cannot ignore those aspects entirely and then focus on the one which upholds the argument only.

You go in VS from survival to turning to comfort. That's the whole point of doing stuff after all... to not struggle but instead have abundance and no worries.
So... what to do when you have comfort? You wanna increase that comfort, right? Does a buff for movement speed increase your comfort when walking distances? Does a boff in mining speed increase your comfort when mining? Does a buff in woodcutting speed increase your comfort when foresting?

I think it does perfectly what you talk about, turning a struggle into comfort if you're willing to invest the effort to achieve it. You only gotta weight if the effort is worth the results.
 

7 hours ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

And if we say "Oh well, just apply it to established players"

What?
That's unreasonable as well.

The baseline is 'I don't have the buff available to me', so it makes exactly ZERO difference to currently now, does it?
If a early food type provides a good fitting buff you need... then great! All the better! Lucky you! It's like having a ruin with copper chunks right at the surface close to your chosen building spot and being able to start off smithing respectively quicker. You don't expect to have it every time, do you? But it's nice to have happen.

What's the downside here specifically?
 

7 hours ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

How do we define a clear line that separates the "eat anything starving survivalist" from the "well established homeowner" who wouldn't want to eat like a pleb anymore? So yeah, not really a solid approach either.

Why do we even need to specifically define that in the first place?
That's what an INCENTIVE is for, isn't it?
People don't make pies because they're 'fancy', they make em because of the materials used being either long-lasting (grain + veggies or fruit over time) or with husbandry readily available (red meat).
That's also the reason why few players deal with fishing, high investment in effort for quite low return and hefty time investment.
Or why basically nobody makes jam or scrambled eggs, it's just not worth the effort for the results.

That's the issue with any system that doesn't provide high enough incentive to use it, it's foregone in favor of efficiency, especially in SP as there is commonly a much lower RP aspect to it then in MP.
But if your cooked fish of a specific type suddenly provides a buff which you like and is really well rolled in efficiency as well? Now suddenly fishing becomes a thing with value attached to it, one it formerly didn't have.
And if your meat pie has a bad buff you don't need attached to it? You'll forego it in favor of something harder to acquire.
And when it has a good buff? Lucky you simply!

It increases the variety substantially, that's all it does.
So a 'well established homeowner' is then someone who's found working good combinations for the things they wanna do regularly. Currently after the initial setup of your fields and a dirt hovel with some metal your only limiting factor in the game is armor quality (to survive combat), weapon quality (to not need as much armor quality) and tool quality. You can still be in a dirt hovel with a few oil lamps by the time you make steel as NOTHING outside of personal enjoyment of creativity and vanity rewards you for doing so.

That brings me back to the Valheim example being given above: That game provided one of the first systems for making food buffs, though in that game it is directly tied to progression, a MANDATORY necessity, not a convenience to get ahead. Same with the housing, causing items to imrove the 'Comfort' level and hence improving your 'Rested' bonus.
There the systems were rather rudimentary, but since then they've been substantially improved and adapted into other games for a reason.
A system rewarding you for using different food types gives incentive to use different ones and can be introduced without ENFORCING it for necessity. That's a major important difference.
And a rested bonus for example (Max health for a while, health regen increase too) with a home that has a nice interior and is made out of proper materials rather then dirt incentivizes to create such structures and leads to the creation of outposts on top... which can grow into new bases, which goes well into connecting them for easier traversal with roads or specifically making them around the translocator network.

INCENTIVE is good, NECESSITY is not. That's the core difference here.

[LadyWYT]

15 minutes ago, Kulze said:

Currently it's 'Pick that ONE recipe which is easiest'.
The difference is that at minimum then it is 'Pick the SEVERAL recipes which are easiest'.

What makes you think that players won't default to a single recipe with this system? They'll find something that's useful and then stick to that, especially if they can't just change their buff on a whim. 

 

19 minutes ago, Kulze said:

As for answering new players:
The explanation: 'Every food you consume has a buff attached, they're unique for your character what you get. Test around!'
Because that's precisely what it is, a system that pushes experimentation instead of mindless repetition with a pre-solved equation you can simply look up.

And what do you tell new players when they want to know how to make a meal to boost their strength? There's no answer other than "just throw things in the cookpot and see what happens", which isn't a satisfying answer if you want specific information. Other gameplay loops you can describe the steps in detail, so new players know exactly what to look for and what to do in order to get a desired outcome.

 

23 minutes ago, Kulze said:

That's a fair point, but also not.
Have you ever 'chosen' to like specific things in life? I didn't, I like them because that's what I'm simply. Nobody 'chooses' to like or dislike specific foods, that's not in your control anyway.

It's a videogame, not real life. Letting players customize their characters tends to give them more attachment to said characters; if you hand them a premade character sheet and they don't like what they were handed, then they stop playing and move on to a different game. Not to mention that if the game decides your character's preferences are all foods that don't exist in your current climate band, then you're screwed for the entire game unless you travel tens of thousands of blocks to a climate that supports the foodstuffs your character likes. And there's no way to figure that out until you've been able to experiment with everything, because the effects are still random and there's no way to know what does what.

For those who really want to play that way though, there is a mod for that: https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/46016

32 minutes ago, Kulze said:

Make a second base. Either give up the former one or connect them.
Search actively for translocators and make them accessible if leading into a positive direction, incentivizing infrastructure to be built and hence increasing the scale of what can be done before becoming solely 'vanity' for creativity's sake.

I shouldn't have to say this, but creating a base and linking it with another is a huge investment, especially for bases that are in different climate bands entirely. It takes days of travel to go from one band to another; translocators can shorten the trip but those are very dicey on where they will actually take you. Likewise, certain foodstuffs require a lot of time to actually acquire--orchards require a couple in-game years to start producing. I don't think players are going to be thrilled about needing to do this just because the RNG shafted them on meal preferences.

 

39 minutes ago, Kulze said:

RNG is a tool, not a menace. Any system based on RNG is a luck-based system by design obviously.

Right, and it's a tool that's very easy to misuse. There's a reason that RNG systems are often some of the most hated design features of games; when the system is based on pure chance and luck the player isn't able to use their knowledge and skills to get the outcome they want.

 

43 minutes ago, Kulze said:

INCENTIVE is good, NECESSITY is not. That's the core difference here.

And the problem is that when you give something a direct buff to using, then it starts to be considered a necessity. Sure, you can choose not to use the item, but you're not going to be playing at the same potential you could be if you had that item. Multiplayer applies even more pressure on that front, since no one likes to feel like the lesser player in the party, and being stronger means you can win fights and gather resources more effectively. And of course on the roleplaying front a system like this is a disaster because players are no longer allowed to write their own characters.

I will also note that players don't need more incentive than their own personal preferences to pursue meal variety. Most players don't like to eat the same two meals for the entire game, and prefer to cook various things to keep the gameplay fresh. Some players prefer pure efficiency and will stick to one or two meals only, which is also fine--they should be allowed to do that. Some players might want to roleplay a character that loves blueberry pie or prefers a simple diet of pot pie, cheese, and currant wine, and that's perfectly fine too. If you look at the various food mods on the ModDB to get an idea of what players look for in a food system, Expanded Foods is by far and away the most popular food mod, and all it does is add more ways to cook meals and more foods to cook. Wildcraft is right up there with it, and all that mod does is add a bunch of new food crops to find and grow. Mods that add more buffs to consuming specific meals also exist, like Gourmand and the one I linked above, and have a respectable download count, but it's nowhere NEAR the numbers that Expanded Foods and Wildcraft have. To me that suggests that players don't need a distinct benefit attached to the food in order to cook it--they like variety and will choose that option themselves. However, if you go attaching specific buffs to the food, then you're removing that choice and pushing them to eat specific things instead of just letting them cook what they actually want to eat.

[williams_482]

9 hours ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

If we wanted to forcibly make the player choose different foods, a wear-off effect might be a better approach. Eat the same food over and over again and it just becomes less and less effective; following the same logic of "Bushmeat gives less nutrition to emulate it being very, very unpalatable" the character would just "grow tired of eating the same dish 10 times in a row". However, I don't see this helping either cause then people just rotate two dishes over and over again. Make the cooldown harder and it becomes unreasonably unfavorable for beginner players that don't have access to reliable variety yet

I agree encouraging variety by making novel foods more effective at being foods is a much better setup than providing arbitrary buffs. However, I suggest that instead of adjusting satiety (which as you note has some serious problems) it should adjust the duration of the hunger pause from meals.

The hunger pause is useful, but not as crucial as the immediate health bar filling effect of a meal. It's also hidden from player by the current interface, so gradual adjustments to the values aren't likely to cause confusion to new players. Make a hidden "recent foods" bar, similar to that satiety bars, which fills up as you eat. Once the bar is full, new foods displace the "memory" of older foods, making the new food less effective and moving older foods closer to peak effectiveness. How much food is "remembered" for how long, how broad or specific food categories can get, how large the hunger pause reductions can get, etc, is all up in the air and can be configured to get the desired effect.

I think this would work because it provides a modest mechanical benefit for variety and some incentive to strategize, and it can do that while still being tuned not to cripple players who insist on just one or two favorite meals, and while having minimal effect on a new character just starting out in the world who hasn't eaten enough to get tired of anything yet. It creates a reason to have high-satiety travel foods which you specifically avoid eating at home so they have the most effect when eaten on the road. 

For example, it could be configured such that players eating 1-4 different unique meals with 4 or fewer unique ingredients between them would suffer the maximum penalty, with only 50% of the current hunger pause per satiety consumed. A player eating two varieties each of four types of meal (of the six possible - pie, stew, porridge, soup, scrambled eggs, jam) and using 2-3 unique ingredients per food group across those meals would be minimally inconvenienced, getting 80-90% of the current hunger pause. More variety of that would certainly have diminishing returns, and the question becomes where to cap it.

I also really like the idea of alcohol cutting into that "recent foods" bar. If you are limited to a small subset of foods (such as during your first winter) or you're about to go on a trip with some high density foods you know you ate recently, you can spend a night getting plastered in your cellar and emerge having largely forgotten what foods your character had grown tired of, then be able to eat them again at maximum effectiveness. This not only gives a mechanical purpose to alcohol, but one that lines up nicely with when you are likely to have access to it.

Edited June 17 by williams_482

[Kulze]

2 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

What makes you think that players won't default to a single recipe with this system?

Multiple buffs hence multiple recipes, by default.
Also depending on which buff options are picked and their magnitude it means potentially even causing a switch in needed recipe by simply switching to another tool material. Just a matter of how varied it's set up.
 

2 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

And what do you tell new players when they want to know how to make a meal to boost their strength?

I just did? As said 'Each gives you a buff specially for only your character... so try it out!'
That's literally the answer, and that's EXACTLY what is intended with the suggestion, to have a NON-FIXED outcome, hence a non-solvable progression which keeps replays 'fresh' in that regard.
Such systems have been used before in games and they're - unless awfully implemented - commonly a positive aspect.
It's not a new invention.
And once again, your argument about 'It's just not a satisfying answer' is nonsensical. Once back to the ruins. 'What will I find exactly in there?' will give you the answer 'xyz, but you don't know until you try, so check it out!' is as unsatisfying an answer.
So once again... is your argument then also related to ruin loot variety and should that be removed? Because it is an IDENTICAL topic.
 

2 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Letting players customize their characters tends to give them more attachment to said characters; if you hand them a premade character sheet and they don't like what they were handed, then they stop playing and move on to a different game.

Also a nonsensical argument, that's not upholding.
You get free reign inside a specific framework, that's it, that's all a videogame can provide reasonably. If you want 100% freedom of pure expression then you need to play Pen&Paper and not a videogame, it's simple as that.

You can give someone a lot of range... or little range, both types of games absolutely do well, it's just a matter of flavor and nothing else and also that is often different for each respective mechanic in a game individually.
Or do you wanna tell me because nobody can choose to be anything else then the pre-made character that's exactly the same as everyone else in Minecraft... everyone does leave Minecraft?
There you have exactly '0' baseline choice. You can change your skin, but that's it, and even that wasn't for years in the game, fun addition though.
 

2 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Not to mention that if the game decides your character's preferences are all foods that don't exist in your current climate band, then you're screwed for the entire game

I would really love proper arguments and not nonsense.
We got 360k combinations in the system currently.
It is a lottery win to not have a single recipe applied to anything reasonable for your character.
Will you have something maybe which you need to put effort in to acquire it? Maybe! And plainly spoken once more: So?

You're arguing about invested effort and how much would be reasonable. So I can only relate to that: How much effort would be reasonable to get a... for example 5% Movement speed buff for a while? And if it's out of your reach... will you just quit because you can't get it right away or ignore it since it does plainly spoken matter 'jack-shit' if you got it or not? It's a nice extra bonus on top, not a mandatory effect which will fail your gameplay entirely.
 

2 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

I shouldn't have to say this

Then don't. You're writing from a position as if it's mandated. It is not a necessary thing to use, it is not game-breaking, it is a bonus. Plain and simple.
That's a given that you need effort to achieve results. If the effort is not worth it you simply don't do it. And for long-term plays in SP or MP servers it is an upside that enhances the experience if used.
Nothing more nothing less.
I really don't get this doomsday talk as if my suggestion would cause the spontaneous combustion of everything you hold dear in your life.
'Devil's Advocate' only works for 'so far', and it's going beyond the scale of reasonable points quite substantially by now.
 

2 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

when the system is based on pure chance and luck the player isn't able to use their knowledge and skills to get the outcome they want.

That's a false generalization if I've ever read one.
Do you want to tell me that the crafting system in Path of Exile (which is deemed as the most comprehensive and even best one for a complex Affix system like they got in that genre) to be a negative?

What you're talking about is pure gambling mechanics like in Black Desert Online, where mandatory progression is locked behind RNG crafting mechanics that have insignificant success-rate based on already very low acquisition rates, hence stalling progression entirely.

This is non-applicable in this case.
 

2 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

And the problem is that when you give something a direct buff to using, then it starts to be considered a necessity.

That's as nonsensical!
By the same argument quenching and tempering should be removed RIGHT NOW!

Come on... not everything is black&white. 'The dose makes the poison' is a really good saying. A low dose has no effects and hence is wasted time, a normal dose has beneficial effects, a high dose has detrimental ones. That's the basis to go by.

You're denying it based on the premise itself, not at the specifics, and that is untenable.
 

1 hour ago, williams_482 said:

it should adjust the duration of the hunger pause from meals.

Yes, that is also a reasonable solution! The hunger-pause is a positive incentivized effect for the player, it reduces resource-usage, especially so in the beginning to mid-game very important.
We just don't have anything upholding after you pass mid-game and are properly settled food-wise.

Overall a good suggestion which you provided beyond that! Very much in favor there.

[MKMoose]

On 6/17/2026 at 3:38 AM, Kulze said:

An seed based on player ID and ID's specified for a food combination. This allows a RNG to set a unique effect only for that player.

The one thing that I especially don't like about a system like this is that it just seems arbitrary. And similar effects can be achieved with a system if some limitations are placed on the randomness. There are plenty of mechanics that could be added to incentivize greater food variety which can easily be justified with something like in-game consistency and specific balance considerations, or with realism if nothing else. For example:

• replacing generic satiety with macronutrients (that all fit into the single bar) which have different effects depending on how much of each the player has, and may interact differently with hunger,
• adding buffs specific to certain food items or broader food categories as a way to make them more unique - similar to what you're suggesting, but fully or mostly predefined rather than random (the exact effects or their potency could still be partially random for each player) - and potentially involving more complex food combinations and preparation methods, for example something with spices and herbs or potentially medicinal ingredients, certain exotic fruit, perhaps something like Valheim's feasts,
• implementing a system in a similar vein to the Novelty! mod, to incentivize variety without asking for specific food items,
• adding some rare food items which are particularly good but virtually impossible to obtain in high quantity, naturally creating a system where the player is incentivized to use these foods whenever possible but cannot subsist exclusively on them,
• implementing more complexity in farming that would incentivize the player to vary their food sources, which would naturally have some downstream effect on what the player eats,
• simply adding more unique foods with interesting and fun crafting processes, with or without unique benefits, not unlike the existing alcohol and dairy.

Each of these alternatives can naturally have its own flaws, so I'm not saying that they would be strictly better. But random meals getting random buffs, unless you put a whole bunch of rules and safeguards in place (at which point you get close to what I was mentioning with predefined buffs), just seems like a system where there is effectively no rhyme or reason for specific meals getting the effects that they get. Which might be fine for some people, but I for one would strongly dislike it.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

On the flip side

2 hours ago, MKMoose said:

But random meals getting random buffs, unless you put a whole bunch of rules and safeguards in place (at which point you get close to what I was mentioning with predefined buffs), just seems like a system where there is effectively no rhyme or reason for specific meals getting the effects that they get. Which might be fine for some people, but I for one would strongly dislike it.

this would be great in single player as a mod, or great in multiplayer as a mod, if someone wanted an additional challenge or just keep the local blackguards out of their coveted meat pies. Wouldn't that be a fun turn of events and the blackguard was forced to be a vegetarian. XD I think they would quit. I know I would.

[LadyWYT]

20 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

Wouldn't that be a fun turn of events and the blackguard was forced to be a vegetarian. XD I think they would quit. I know I would.

I mean if they aren't quitting, they're going to be submitting bug reports and complaints about how they aren't getting the same buffs as their friends despite eating the exact same meal. Imagine being the one guy in a group of friends who doesn't get any useful buffs because none of the local ingredients happened to be what the game decided his character enjoys.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

1 minute ago, LadyWYT said:

I mean if they aren't quitting, they're going to be submitting bug reports and complaints about how they aren't getting the same buffs as their friends despite eating the exact same meal. Imagine being the one guy in a group of friends who doesn't get any useful buffs because none of the local ingredients happened to be what the game decided his character enjoys.

Hey I decide what my character enjoys and if I want to install a mod that turns drifter underwear (flax) into s'mores so I can eat them, then I'm gonna do it!

[Kulze]

2 hours ago, MKMoose said:

There are plenty of mechanics that could be added to incentivize greater food variety which can easily be justified with something like in-game consistency and specific balance considerations, or with realism if nothing else.

Yes, absolutely so! That was just my suggestion.

You've provided a few good ones definitely! The extra complexity of macronutrients, categorization and farm complexity are a few good ones. Albeit the last is to be handled with quite a lot of care, people already struggle a bit with temperature swings and how to handle nutrients with growing time, it's a entry-barrier already that's substantial but inconsequential when understanding the system.

As for the rules and safeguards... I would say the safeguard is it being a small buff, something which is nice... but not mandatory and not game-breaking. Percentile increases work fine here overall, like 5% movement, 5% damage and so on. In no stage of the game would they be overpowered at least.
 

29 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

they're going to be submitting bug reports and complaints about how they aren't getting the same buffs as their friends despite eating the exact same meal.

That's another nonsensical one right there!

It would lead to questions on the forum, Discord or Reddit. Not bug reports, outside of some half-wits, but you cannot make things idiot-proof, an idiot will proof you only that they can be an even bigger one, you can only do reasonably expected measures before anything becomes simply nonsense, in either way.
Complaints for sure... but people also complain about bowthorns, the tempering/quenching mechanic, the temperature for farming and nutrients for farming. Complaints come from absolutely any friction-based mechanic without fail, it's a core task to differentiate between reasonable and unreasonable comments there.
 

56 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

Wouldn't that be a fun turn of events and the blackguard was forced to be a vegetarian.

I don't think with the sheer variety of applicable recipes with meat inside we would see that happening.
After all 2 red meat with 2 onions gives in that case a different buff then 3 red meat with 1 onion, which also gives a different one from 2 red meat with 1 onion and 1 carrot.
If we solely cut it down to meat/fish and veggy stews in a meal then we have 10 'full' meat stews (3 red, 3 poultry, 3 fish, 1 bushmeat) then from those we get 2 options, a double and a single added ingredient. hence 8 extra ones for veggies for the single ones and 64 for double ones in options.
Which is a total of 222 options solely on meat-based meals.

That's a lot of options already. Not to speak directly cooked fish and directly cooked redmeat making up 57 extra ones for a total of 279 potential options for a specific outcome.
And that's not putting any grain, honey or fruit into consideration.

It just won't happen to be so so soooooo unlucky to have this existing. And plainly spoken... if it happens then that's once more a lottery-win, and a grand option to state 'My blackguard is a really picky eater!'

The point is that the sheer variety of different meal combinations already existing in the game does remove this risk nigh entirely, it is so large that it solely enhances the variety. Any RNG which has a significantly small percentile basically doesn't exist in a reasonably expected playthrough after all.
It's like a spawn-location which starts you in a rocky hole... you won't be able to get out potentially and have to re-make a world, which can happen, but is just so insignificantly rare that it plays no role.

[LadyWYT]

20 minutes ago, Kulze said:

It would lead to questions on the forum, Discord or Reddit.

Questions that can't be answered, because the effects that ingredients have are tied to the individual player AND the world seed. It's therefore not possible to learn what an ingredient does and then use that knowledge in future playthroughs without playing the exact same world seed, nor is it possible to share your knowledge with other players since the effects they get will be entirely different.

It'd be like trying to play Elder Scrolls alchemy, but the ingredient effects are completely random for each character file. In Skyrim, you can combine butterfly wings with blue mountain flowers to get a healing potion, and have that as a solid option for early game healing potions in every playthrough. However, when the effects are always randomized, then you can't reliably make any potions at all until you've sunk hours into a single save file just figuring out which ingredients do what...and then you get to repeat that process every time you make a new character. No writing notes, no remembering what does what, no looking up information to figure out good combinations, because none of that applies to a new game. Like @Teh Pizza Lady said--it's a good idea for a mod, since there are some players who might enjoy that as a one-time challenge, and a mod lets players opt in to playing that way without changing the game for everyone else. But when you go changing the vanilla game itself, then you're expecting everyone to play that way by default, since that's not the kind of system you just toggle on/off in the game settings.

[Kulze]

1 hour ago, LadyWYT said:

Questions that can't be answered

What do you mean with 'questions that can't be answered'?
Do you deem every individual to be a world-class moron inherently?

I get making sure that a mechanic won't turn into any ill-advised results that destroy the enjoyment of the game... but for god's sake, it's getting beyond ridiculous.
You wanna tell me you lack the simple capacity to state 'It's a randomized system, you need to find out which food gives you which buff personally' while also the recipient of this completely viable and 100% understandable answer lacks the capacity to understand it?
 

1 hour ago, LadyWYT said:

It'd be like trying to play Elder Scrolls alchemy, but the ingredient effects are completely random for each character file.

First off... this is NOT a system with even a remotely relevant measure of gameplay impact compared to ES alchemy. You seem to really REALLY lack the understanding of what magnitude of existing variety does to a RNG system.

In ESO we got 4 effects on each ingredient. There are ~500 ingredients available in the game, with a large portion being quite rare.
Now... dare to tell me how high the chance for a randomizer would be to allow cheap recipes to now have solely the health (and potentially other positive effects) on it without also creating negative effects on top?
Ah yes... quite low? You don't say!
For a game-defining mechanic?
Untenable. Obviously it's not done. It's once again a completely bonkers example. Please for the love of it... it's beyond ridiculous what you're writing.

In VS we have 300000 different combinations. For a SINGLE effect granted by each, randomized.
Let that number sink in. 300000 chances to get the right one from a list of... 10....20...60 effects possible.
Now let's math it out, should we? Realistically to see what a complete nonsensical argument you wrote there, showcasing it in cold hard numbers with a extremely simplified outcome in your favor, masisvely so.

In VS we got 'basic cooking','meals' and 'baking'.
This means nigh every ingredient provides directly at least a single edible outcome by itself.
And we got 6 meal types.
Meat stew, veggie stew, porridge, soup, scrambled eggs and jam.
Meat stew is based on 2 meat
Veggie stew on 2 veggies
Porridge on 2 grain
Soup on 1 beggie + water
Scrambled eggs on 2 eggs
Jam on 2 fruit + 2 honey.

So we remove for simplicity sake to show actual access 'Jam' and 'Scrambled eggs' from the list, neither honey nor eggs are 'readily available', they absolutely are... but it takes a miniscule amount of effort at least to have, so we ignore it already. Just to put it into your favor even more, which will happen even more along the way.

That leaves the basis of 'Meat', 'Veggie', 'Grain', 'Veggie+water' for our 'reasonable example'.
Reasonably we have access to bushmeat and meat, not taking poultry or fish into consideration. So 2 proteins.
Reasonably we have access to 3 grains.
Reasonably we have access to 3 veggie types.
Reasonably we have access to 4 fruit types from trees.
Reasonably we have access to 3 berry types.
Reasonably we have access to at least 4 mushroom types.
We have access to water.

So basic options:
17 options.

We math it out via a 'random selection from a pool' and the relevant chance to miss any pool-part (hence any buff). The formula for that is: ( 1 - 1/N)^k
N = buff options
k = food options

So that means our chance to not have one is:
10 buffs: 16,67%
20 buffs: 41,81%
60 buffs: 75,23%
So... untenable!

So next step, how many actual meal combinations do we have? This is baseline option + (baseline option + every possible addition) + (baseline option + every possible addition x every possible addition).
Meat stew: 1 + (1 + (7 [fruit+berry] + 7 [veggie+mushrooms] + 1 [extra meat]) + (1 + 15 [every applicable type together] x 14 [cannot use fruit twice]) = 1 + 16 + 211 = 228 options.
Veggie stew: 1 + (1 + 7) + (1 + 7 x7) = 1 + 8 + 50 = 59 options.
Porridge: 1 + (1 + 17) + (1 + 17 x 17) = 1 + 18 + 290 = 309 options.
Soup: 1 + (1 + 8 ) + (1 + 8 x 7 ) = 1 + 9 + 57 = 67 options.
Total: 663 options.

Total sum: 17 + 663 = 680 options.

10 buffs: 7.672e-30 %
20 buffs: 7.113e-14 %
60 buffs: 0.00113904 %

I think we can ignore the bakery goods, can't we?

Hence solely from meals and direct consumption - easily acquirable - and no major progression into the game we have 1 in 878 characters which wouldn't get ANY INDIVIDUAL buff from the applied list of foods possible already. With the highest possible amount of individual buffs for the example. And basically non-existent with 10 simple ones, and also non-existent with 20.

It becomes a near statistical impossibility if we add baked goods, drinks, poultry, fish, more variety in terms of access to it before long.

The whole argument of 'But someone could miss having one of the buffs available at all' argument is statistically non-existent in VS.

Edited June 18 by Kulze

[LadyWYT]

It's simple: if I make a stew from redmeat, cabbage, and turnips, and get +10% to strength after eating it, then I'm going to expect to use the same ingredients to cook the same recipe later and get the same benefit, regardless of whether it's the same world or a different world. If I'm cooking the same recipe but getting different results, that's not encouraging me to figure out more about the game. That's the game arbitrarily deciding what the outcome will be and telling me, the player, that it's useless to learn anything since the knowledge can't be applied to produce consistent outcomes.

[Rainbow Fresh]

Since you are still insistent to scream "Bloody Idiot" at anyone not mindlessly agreeing with your hillbilly (didn't you actually say "Ask AI"?) math and one-sided vision for "I want this mechanic, therefor everyone should agree it's great" I'mma gonna give reasoning a second shot, even though I really don't want to get involved anymore in this pointless arguing.

Let's start with the elephant in the room: Your favorite numbers. "360000" or whatever other number suits right then and there "different dishes". I already said that we have, logically and game-code speaking about 6 or so actually different dish recipes that count as prepared meals. The rest is simply generating a name from the ingredients and combining their satiety values into a dynamic end result item. The game overselling on food "variety" is actually kinda misleading here and I can clearly see why mods like Culinary Artillery or Expanded Foods or whatever are so popular. But whatever, let's assume we hook up a persistently seeded RNG up to every distinctly named combination and spread miniscule 5% buffs in, what, 6 categories across those 300k options. Congratulations, it achieves nothing. If "2 meat and 2 onions" is a different "dish" then "3 meat and 1 onion", same as "1 meat and 3 onions" (which doesn't even exist iirc) then chances are high enough for you to get all buffs just using the same logical dish after all. Meaning I can still just go and farm all spelt, onions and flax only. No incentive to actually try something else, just a matter of balancing the ingredient ratio based on my buff need.

Secondly, super-imposing mechanics from an ever-growing sheet of other reference games that you'd want in VS isn't making for a convincing argument. VS, for most parts of the survival aspect, roots it's balancing and mechanics decision in some sort of reality. Tell me, where exactly in reality does throwing more or less onion into my stew make me walk faster, punch harder or whatever? Plainly, it doesn't. In reality you spread out your diet between different dishes because eating the same thing over and over again gets boring - something a videogame can hardly replicate. And putting in such a penalty was already mentioned as "not a great time". If you want to reasonably incentivise spreading out your diet, make more use of the existing nutrition category system. Your max health is already increasing with a balanced diet, maybe give small buffs to other aspects aswell. More run speed because you body is well fed and built muscle. Something like that. If you want to take ideas from other games, go look at Project Zomboid. The food system there would fit very nicely and does incentivise using many different available options all without magically making you stronger. Though granted, the main takeaway I'd take from Project Zomboid and why its food system is so great is simply because the indepth, engaging variety in food preparation makes it such a nice mechanic the player wants to voluntarily engage with it more. Something mods already brought to VS, successfully, showing - as others mentioned before - how simple changes/additions like that can also achieve the same result without the downsides of gating a core part of the gameplay loop experience behind the almighty RNG.

Thirdly. Your insistence on "all forms of RNG are the same" whenever saying "no to this means no to ruin loot" fits the narrative vs. "there are many forms of RNG and most of which are good". Ruin loot is randomized, within a pool. A clearly communicated, fixed pool, all the same. You can go tell a new player asking about them "You need to be lucky for the right drop, but if you want Fire Clay you want to look at Forage and Arctic Supply vessels". If you want tools - well, tool vessels and hope for copper or tin bronze. It is RNG and as such has "variety", but within a clearly defined set of options - the more option your try the more world exploration you do in turn. Telling people "Nobody knows, go figure it out yourself" is not the same, great RNG experience. A repeated "learning" experience also only hold water for as long as you can reasonably be bothered. Seeing as your other prime argument is "it's so optionally miniscule it doesn't matter of you get a bad roll", having to re-learn the right recipes on every new character very quickly turns into a tedious slogh outweighing its intended benefits. If the buffs are so optional and ignorable, why would I bother trying dozens, hundreds of different "recipes" then write down the right ones just for myself as noone else benefits from it ever? I make my pie and call it a day. Once again, the intended incentive nullified. Except for those people, who didn't need one to begin with because they just like to roleplay or experiment for variety's sake.

And finally, if your only argument for why this is a good mechanic is insulting everyone as spewing nonesense who doesn't agree with you and repeating the same three barely held-together arguments of how the numbers behind RNG define a good game for everyone (while arguing against the very players who engage with the game outside of your math already voicing doubts and concerns) it really doesn't help sell your point.

 

Tl;dr, food variety could use some incentive. Food/cooking as a whole could do with a rework. I fully agree this far. Randomizing miniscule buffs per character across "300000 different dishes" is not it though. Moose's ideas above could be going into the right direction more. Simply expanding the engagement behind the food-making process such as mods like Culinary Artillery do or games like PZ have showcased successfully would also already go a long way to enrich and incentivise the process of experimentation without resorting to biologically sound penalties.

[Bruno Willis]

Hey, sorry to jump into this full on discussion without reading all the arguments, I just want to add my two cents to the general topic:

I really like having reasons to eat lots of different meals, and the current nutrition system helps with that. This mod: https://mods.vintagestory.at/novelty takes that mechanic a bit further, adding an extra nutrition bar which gets filled a little each time you eat a substance you havn't eaten recently. Suddenly the wide range of mushrooms make sense, and I find I'm fishing more, collecting many types of berries and making mixed berry pies with all three basic doughs. It works, really well. 

If you care about a sense of realism when it comes to food, I'd really recommend checking this mod out. It solves the problem. Personally, I think it should be adapted into the base game and wouldn't need much changed.

[Bruno Willis]

Thinking about favorite foods, I think it'd be really fun to have a mid-late game mechanic so that you can establish your favorite foods. What if that was what proper cutlery and plates were for?

Finally I've made knifes, forks, spoons and chopsticks, and a glazed plate and bowl. I'm going to sit down at a table and eat a meal, a meal I think my seraph likes a lot. The first time you eat a specific meal using all the best culinary tools, the game rolls a dice, maybe having a 1 in 3 chance to hit, and make that food one of your favorites. Maybe each seraph can have 2 - 4 favorite meals max, and you have a part to play in choosing them, but you're not guaranteed to get it right. 

If we're using the novelty mod system, your favorite foods could fill the novelty nutrition bar twice as fast (but if you're eating the same meal over and over again, it's going to stop helping pretty quickly, whether it's a fav. or not). Otherwise, your favorite foods could fill their appropriate nutrition bars further, or apply the hunger cooldown for longer (as suggested in some of the previous comments).

The point would be that you still have to try several meals to find what's your favorite, but you've got a bit of choice as to what ends up as a favorite meal. It would also be fun to lay the table properly, for one, and then carefully eat the stew you've been subsisting on for a year, only to confirm, "yup, that's not my favorite meal. Thought so." 

[MKMoose]

3 hours ago, Kulze said:

We math it out via a 'random selection from a pool' and the relevant chance to miss any pool-part (hence any buff). The formula for that is: ( 1 - 1/N)^k
N = buff options
k = food options

That formula is for missing one specific option out of N. The formula for missing any one or more options is significantly more complex and should naturally always return a higher chance.

 

3 hours ago, Kulze said:

So next step, how many actual meal combinations do we have? This is baseline option + (baseline option + every possible addition) + (baseline option + every possible addition x every possible addition).
Meat stew: 1 + (1 + (7 [fruit+berry] + 7 [veggie+mushrooms] + 1 [extra meat]) + (1 + 15 [every applicable type together] x 14 [cannot use fruit twice]) = 1 + 16 + 211 = 228 options.
Veggie stew: 1 + (1 + 7) + (1 + 7 x7) = 1 + 8 + 50 = 59 options.
Porridge: 1 + (1 + 17) + (1 + 17 x 17) = 1 + 18 + 290 = 309 options.
Soup: 1 + (1 + 8 ) + (1 + 8 x 7 ) = 1 + 9 + 57 = 67 options.
Total: 663 options.

And wrong formula again. Grossly wrong. What is of interest in this case is the number of k-combinations (the order in the cookpot doesn't matter) with repetitions (we can use multiples of the same ingredient). In the simplest case - vegetable stew - it's the number of 4-element multisubsets from a 7-element set: (10 * 9 * 8 * 7) / (4 * 3 * 2) = 210. If I didn't mess up the mental math somewhere, the correct meal count with your initial assumptions is 89 + 210 + 800 + 112 = 1211.

However, multichoose still leaves the problem of "sub-meals" (meals which can be created with the same ingredients as another, more complex meal) and ingredients for a meal all potentially giving different buffs, which I was alluding to in regards to safeguards and rules to control the randomness.

The simplest albeit still likely insufficient way to address most problems with your proposed system is to exclude individual food items and meals with repeated ingredients, which could land (with your initial assumptions) at a total of 0 + 35 + 77 + 66 = 178 early-game meals which are actually somewhat unique.

Edited June 18 by MKMoose

[Kulze]

So, to cut it down in size:

@Rainbow Fresh I specifically called out nonsensical arguments, not reasonable ones.

As you stated, and I also agree with, Moose's idea is currently the best in that regard, as well as the mod Bruno linked. I did absolutely smack down on comments which were absolute and entire nonsense though. And I'll also call you out on 'calling me out' there. If you re-read properly you'll see that I answered everyone but one person neutrally or positively, for a reason.
The 3 things which led to it were:
-'If you provide an incentive then people will pivot to it' which is a 'No shit Sherlock' argument but was used as a method to speak against it. That's bad communication by itself as it proclaims 'Incentive will cause people to stop using non-incentives' which is obvious. We don't use flint tools after achieving copper tools if we can help it. It's presented as a negative though, which deserves a verbal smack to be clear.
-'People will make bug reports about it'... I hope you can see what a non-argument that is without issue.
-'If a question comes then you won't be able to answer it' which was even repeated. And I did answer it neutrally the first time if you re-read. Only after repeatedly pushing on that - plainly spoken still absolutely nonsensical - point I went into smacking that verbally back. It's not a rocket-science thing presented, it's a simplistic system where said question is as simply answered.
That was it. And the next time something like this happens I'll still smack down on it again because that way of argumentation towards my idea rather then something in the direction of 'I wouldn't like it, xyz would feel better overall' are extremely detrimental to any creative thinking. As mentioned above 'Devil's Advocate' only goes 'so far'. It has limits and if you go substantially beyond them you get verbally smacked, and reasonably so, it's to be expected to not create a walking menace.

You're also right with it not fitting well into the survival realism style. I couldn't think of a tenable mechanic at the time which would be, Moose's did instead, which, Kudos there! So I went the second-best option. Gameplay-focus. If something is a shortcoming (food variety issues are sadly) and no realistic solution is found then a gamified one at least fulfills the job of keeping engagement for it.

Same with your argument about it potentially becoming a tedium. Yes, that is a risk, absolutely so, fully on your side there! One solution is a tiering method, allows to keep effect variety low but probability of getting a good result nonetheless adequately rare which leads to low effort to get the baseline result but higher effort to maximize it all. Hence it only plays a role for someone actively hunting every bit of min-max possible. Which is also someone which is less likely to restart a map repeatedly, so likely not much of an issue, could become one though if not well handled.

@Bruno Willis Like the cutlery idea! Would expand on the usage of material and allow better interior design at the same time. Plus a bonus for doing things with a nice base.
Also great to see that mod already exists, didn't know about that one. Yes, that's one I agree with as well, a version of that absolutely should be vanilla.

@MKMoose You're right, it's only for 'one', though the argument also was only about 'the one wanted'. Overall to miss an option would be higher, true.
And the second... I didn't think about that, totally missed that position wouldn't effect it, hence 'meat,meat,parsnip,carrot' being the same as 'meat,meat,carrot,parsnip'. Yeah, then we lean more towards the lower variety option for buffing definitely, meaning with 60 different ones it would actually start to become a serious problem.
Ultimately it would still keep the chance for that specific circumstance very low at least and is solved with a method allowing to change the buff for a specific combination, like alcohol or the new mushrooms.
Good catch definitely.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

I can't think of a single successful game where food gave random buffs that was unique to each player. Doesn't really seem like a good idea and is probably better relegated to a mod instead of the base game. If it were implemented into the base game I'd probably install a mod to remove it in all honesty.

[Kulze]

1 hour ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

I can't think of a single successful game where food gave random buffs that was unique to each player. Doesn't really seem like a good idea and is probably better relegated to a mod instead of the base game. If it were implemented into the base game I'd probably install a mod to remove it in all honesty.

I mean... as stated: 'Wurm Online' was quite an active game - and still exists nowadays - which uses that exact system in place actually. And it's interesting, functional and actually quite well designed with their other mechanics in place.
That was by the way the last game where 'Notch' (the creator of Minecraft if not known) was working on before making himself self-employed. He's the co-creator of the game. It's the inspiration for a game to allow adjusting everything in the world fully as well as making it block-based, albeit Wurm only had 2 layers, above and below ground in functionality for the longest time unlike Minecraft. Much earlier project simply.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

I wouldn't call it successful.

A successful game is actually known beyond a passing mention on a forum.

Edited June 19 by Teh Pizza Lady