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

[LadyWYT]

5 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

I wouldn't call it successful.

In fairness I wouldn't call it a total flop either. But to my knowledge it's not exactly a game you can mention and have people immediately know what you're talking about(as opposed to Minecraft, WoW, FFXIV, Mario, Skyrim, etc). 

According to Steam, it has a Mixed reception at 62%. The positive reviews seem to be those that really enjoy crafting, games that are heavily focused on community(so not friendly to solo play), and extremely grindy MMOs. The negative reviews express a lot of frustration with how much the game makes players grind to get anywhere, clunky controls and mechanics, dated graphics, not enough players, "free to play" being a little misleading...the nail in the coffin, in my opinion, was the negative review from the guy who put over 2400 hours into the game, and he made it pretty clear that it was the friends he had in the game, and not the game itself, that really kept him invested. 

[Kulze]

Fair enough.

[HAG-646]

i think there should simple be a new metric every ingredients have but with diminishing return the more you eat them: "Joy".
It would either just works like the "protein", "grain", etc. metric or even add a new effect but the whole point would be to vary food sources and even pave the way to spices.
It doesn't even have to be written in the ingredients or dishe's notes since its different every time, you could just hover over the joy bar to see suggestions of what your seraph might want (and what you already have)

[qualicabyss]

Giving randomized buffs to food just delays when you will end up stuck on a limited amount of meals, and makes it worse.
Lets say you have 1 meat and 2 vegetable types, you can make 6 types of meat stew and far more vegetable stews, with randomized buffs sure you might try all of those out, but afterward you'll only be using a few of them.
randomized buffs encourage variety via exploration at first then heavily punish it.

Also Players eat a decent variety of foods as is.
You have by default 5 because of bonus health from variety we already have.
But thats only the start.
You also have honey from bees, a second vegtable or grain for crop rotation, and maybe even eggs.
You have 3 different types of cheese, fruit juice, fruit alcohol, mead, pickles, and cured meat.
Then you have all the random meals you can make with this stuff, pies, stews, scrambled eggs, jams, and baked bread.
All this is basically the minimum, as perhaps a player is growing more things just because.
Players will naturally switch between foods as some get close to rotting, or run out, for the health bonus, for long journeys, or even just because.

All randomized buffs will do is limit players to specific recipes with good buffs after trying out a bunch of them for awhile

[sleeves]

I think the problem with procedural food is that runs are long. In a roguelike where you're starting over constantly, having to re-discover everything is fun and engaging. If I've been playing a world for hundreds of hours then I already discovered every food effect a long time ago, and now it's just back to usual. Something like the novelty mod (as mentioned in this thread) is cool, but having a separate meter feels a little overcomplicated to me. I have a multi-part idea for a similar mechanic though:

• Remove current meal bonus
• Eating more food at once restores more hunger
• Eating the same ingredients too often reduces maximum hunger

This would penalize spam-eating, yet make it necessary when maintaining a narrow diet, all without adding new status bars or random values.

[Kulze]

@HAG-646 I think provided the best solution for the moment. Every ingredient getting a 'joy' value which reduces when repeatedly eaten would provide the best results I imagine.

It's simple, it's flexible and only needs to be balanced around the overall expected variety for one to have.
 

On 6/20/2026 at 11:29 PM, qualicabyss said:

Also Players eat a decent variety of foods as is.

That's only the case if someone has a need for high health, which often isn't the case as the game progresses.
Neither spelunking happens regularly then, nor are the story areas repeatedly visited every day.

The goal here is not a specific system but a solution to provide a reason to keep variety up no matter what you do. If you build you're not focused on variety of food, whatever is available and easy is done. Same with farming, woodcutting, basic material collection. There is no necessity to have high HP during those times as you progress, even without the nutrition buff a decent armor will keep any potential dangers quite minimal at that time already.

What I imagine could be a overall solution is to implement the 'joy' mechanic which was suggested with a single 'universal' buff which is 'action speed'. This would then affect movement speed, the ability to hammer metal or add clay voxels, general tool speed, so a bonus to mining, cutting, harvesting.
It starts at the baseline we currently have anyway and then goes up to around 10-20%, something in that range I imagine would bode well. Not game-breaking but still a significant difference to seek it out.

[Demoncyborg]

On 6/17/2026 at 2:38 AM, Kulze said:

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

3 hours ago, Kulze said:

There is no necessity to have high HP during those times as you progress, even without the nutrition buff a decent armor will keep any potential dangers quite minimal at that time already.

I do think it's very important to note that it's QUITE the buff. It isn't just a small percentile increase or something, you can get up to 12.5 bonus HP with all nutrition maxxed out, in a game where your base HP is 15. You can nearly DOUBLE your health with the current food variety alone.

I think with the current limitation on what you can actually put dairy in, as well as the different combos currently in place for food, it's a really good middle ground for all players.

You still need to eat at least 2-3 different types of meals to get all of your nutrition stats up, and in my opinion; or at least the way I play, the incentive to make different food is to speed up that process evenly. If i've got low grain, little fruit, but tons of protein and veg, I can make some porridge to target what I need. oh but hey, all my crocks are full from the last harvest- guess I should make a fruit pie instead.

Nutrition is absolutely an incentive for a player like me who's really crap at the games combat. I don't really wear armor- i'm a homebody!  but I like being able to survive a swipe from a bear suddenly creeping out of the woods onto my farms.

[Kulze]

You're absolutely right, it is a HEFTY buff. But it's limited to combat only and also a bit misleading in design.
After all you'll commonly eat meals made out of either meat+veggie to be filling (if meat's available) or pies which are grain and veggie/meat.

So you always have 5 Bonus HP anyway, which means your 'available' bonus HP from actual effort is 7,5 and not 12,5. You reach those baseline 5 automatically without doing anything at nigh all times outside of dieing.

And you're absolutely right! It's a good buff type, and a good system to reduce the difficulty substantially for those which aren't top-tier at combat, hence why it is definitely a 'has to stay' mechanic.
The 'joy' option though would provide a extra incentive which is not related to combat itself, and hence applies always... so something to be sought out if you're good at combat or not... or if you're intending to engage in combat or not.

What the game misses is simply a incentive to always push you to eat as varied as possible rather then allowing to absolutely forego it without any negative effects for your playstyle. For me personally the last time I actively went for food variety out of the HP reason was back in .18 for example, ever since I've foregone it entirely and just done variety because of personal RP reasons, hence without incentive itself, which is not something many people go for. Incentive is important.

[Heegrim]

I don’t know about the random buff system but maybe there could be slight penalties for eating the same thing over and over. Nothing too annoying, just something like the eating animation is slowed or you only eat half a portion at a time if all you have had all week is porridge with mashed turnips. Or there could be slight positives like a longer hunger pause from meals when their ingredients are varied. 
 

The stat buffs should be left to herbalism/alchemy instead of cooking.