core systems Starving Overhaul - Suggestion

[navala]

Hello all,

New player here so I'm not super familiar with the game, but I've put in about 8 hours or so, and noticed something that I think needs reworked. Hunger, and damage from starving can be negated by using horsetail poultices. As nice as this is to just simply heal out starving damage, I feel like this breaks the game's core system of survival. So instead of just whining about a mechanic, I did some thinking and wanted to put forward a potential overhaul to the starvation damage a player would face.

Instead of taking simple damage from starvation, I feel like the player's health point total should be reduced. I noticed with a proper balanced diet, you get a pretty awesome boost to your health points. So to counter that, starving should take away those extra health points. The implementation via the HUD would be simple. Instead of displaying the bar moving from Right to Left, indicating a loss in health points, a secondary bar would move left to right, showing that the available health point pool is shrinking. This means when you're starving, any extra bit of damage comes as a much intense hit. As in real life, when you're hungry you slow down and getting hurt has a much higher chance of putting you down and out.

Now to add yet another suggestion, to cures to healing health point loss from starvation. Yes it eventually should come back with time, but I think teas could act as a relief to damage taken by hunger, also some teas could be used to boost certain stats, or even cure certain conditions.(Perhaps helping quickly rid of the effects of poisonous mushrooms, or even hasten to rid oneself of the effects felt by psychedelic mushrooms)

Also I'd really like to see coffee in this game, as since I'm suggesting tea, I'm sure my fellow coffee drinkers would love to see one of their favorite beverages introduced.

Attached below is a example I whipped up quickly for what starving damage could look like on the hud.

[LadyWYT]

1 hour ago, navala said:

I'm sure my fellow coffee drinkers would love to see one of their favorite beverages introduced.

https://mods.vintagestory.at/coffeeandtea

In any case, welcome to the forums and game!

1 hour ago, navala said:

Now to add yet another suggestion, to cures to healing health point loss from starvation. Yes it eventually should come back with time, but I think teas could act as a relief to damage taken by hunger, also some teas could be used to boost certain stats, or even cure certain conditions.(Perhaps helping quickly rid of the effects of poisonous mushrooms, or even hasten to rid oneself of the effects felt by psychedelic mushrooms)

I'm guessing this is probably how herbalism and status effects will work, or at least, work in part once added to the game. Regarding starvation, locking the player out of part of their health pool seems a likely way to handle it, but starvation mechanics are one of those things that's difficult to balance. Too little pressure, and the player ends up ignoring food supply entirely. Too harsh of consequences, and the player can wind up soft-locking themselves in that world since they either ignored food supply or otherwise were unable to secure enough food for whatever reason(generally newer players in this case).

[Rainbow Fresh]

Oh boi oh boi, time to copy paste! Cause I just answered a very similar thread.

In order to have the forgiving nature of not-immediate death starvation while still aiming at a punishing, detrimental system heavily encouraging actually eating like a human would as well as trying to avoid softlocking unaware players, how about we tweak the numbers and systems like this:

• There is still the slow starvation aspect whereas if you reach 0 satiety, you will grow weaker and weaker until you eventually die.
• Recovery should be harder than starving so we can say -1 Max HP per day vs. +0.5 Max HP per day.
• Instead of just being a timer that ticks if satiety = 0 and doesn't if satiety > 0 for starvation with a second timer that ticks with satiety >0 and stop with satiety = 0, how about a moving delta; Baseline you neither lose nor gain Max HP (only base HP, not nutrition bonus). When your satiety reaches 0, your delta moves by, let's just eyeball, -0.25 delta Max HP per day. Meaning if you keep your satiety at 0, you will lose 0.25 Max HP per day after the first day, 0.5 Max HP per day after the second, 0.75 and so on. The longer you actively starve, the worse it gets until you will inevitably die.
• If you get your satiety up to over 50%, you apply a reverse delta. +0.1 Max HP delta per day, for example, so you slowly recover. That also means if you are too far gone already, you will not recover in time before your Max HP reach 0, killing you.
• For incentive and player control, we could also add certain hearty dishes (tied to the current hunger pause mechanic, maybe?) that give a bigger boost to try and heavily course-correct but only if you actually invest in proper food.
• In order to not completely screw anyone over who is struggling and didn't manage to get any food for a single day with a permanent drain, there is also baseline correction. Over time, if your satiety is >0 you will slowly, naturally drift towards 0 delta. Meaning if you are a struggling beginner who doesn't get any food for a single day and briefly hits 0 gaining Max HP loss, then struggling to find enough to get reliably above 50% satiety, you will still slowly stop losing Max HP. Not gain any back unless properly fed, but also not doomed to die.
• As for death penalty; I'd say you keep respawning with half satiety (no free recovery) and the -delta is set to 0 but instead you keep your Max Health reduced to a minimum of, let's say, 25% of the world setting base health. That way you have a small leverage to try and recover while being handicapped enough to discourage tactical food ignorance.
• As a bonus, because pure penalties are shit, even when at full base Max HP you can retain positive delta up to a certain cap. This allows you stave off onsetting starvation through enough healthy eating beforehand. Natural delta decay will, however, also affect positive deltas so if you do not eat very healthily constantly, you will naturally go back down +-0.
• Finally, the nutrition system of the game needs no changing imo. Death cuts it in half already. It naturally decays with lack of food. And pre-filling all your nutrition bars gives a bigger buffer to potentially outlast severe starvation where food would otherwise not course-correct your Max HP loss fast enough.

That is my approach to your idea of a Max HP-based slow starvation system. I don't really agree that teas should aid with combating starvation. Starvation is because you are critically lacking food and as such energy in your body. No matter how much of a Spiffing Brit fan one is, Tea does not give you superpowers. I can still see it aid with your other suggestions, but not fight off starvation.

[Sunny_Sometimes]

1 hour ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

That is my approach to your idea of a Max HP-based slow starvation system. I don't really agree that teas should aid with combating starvation. Starvation is because you are critically lacking food and as such energy in your body. No matter how much of a Spiffing Brit fan one is, Tea does not give you superpowers. I can still see it aid with your other suggestions, but not fight off starvation.

Where I could see herbal remedies offering a use here is as a digestive aid. Dandelion or ginger consumed in a tea or meal could increase the max HP gain delta in a given day (assuming 50%+ satiety). Would have a low cap, maybe going from +0.1 HP to +0.15 or +0.2 HP, and that cap could be reached by having the tea, hot, 2-3 times in a day

Otherwise I very much like your approach.

[MKMoose]

10 hours ago, navala said:

Instead of displaying the bar moving from Right to Left, indicating a loss in health points, a secondary bar would move left to right, showing that the available health point pool is shrinking.

I do like this idea quite a lot, overall. Reminds me of PEAK's stamina bar:

which is a simple but pretty brilliant implementation of something akin to status effects. Barotrauma also uses a much more complex status effect system which ends up having a similar end effect in many cases, albeit without clear UI  indicators to facilitate a deeper medical system.

In the case of VS, the factors that reduce maximum health in the same way besides hunger could also easily include internal damage or long-term injuries, hypothermia and hyperthermia, poison, diseases (which I frankly don't get the point of, but Tyron has said he was interested in implementing something of the sort), and possibly a bunch of other things.

 

3 hours ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

• Recovery should be harder than starving so we can say -1 Max HP per day vs. +0.5 Max HP per day.
• Instead of just being a timer that ticks if satiety = 0 and doesn't if satiety > 0 for starvation with a second timer that ticks with satiety >0 and stop with satiety = 0, how about a moving delta; Baseline you neither lose nor gain Max HP (only base HP, not nutrition bonus). When your satiety reaches 0, your delta moves by, let's just eyeball, -0.25 delta Max HP per day. Meaning if you keep your satiety at 0, you will lose 0.25 Max HP per day after the first day, 0.5 Max HP per day after the second, 0.75 and so on. The longer you actively starve, the worse it gets until you will inevitably die.
• If you get your satiety up to over 50%, you apply a reverse delta. +0.1 Max HP delta per day, for example, so you slowly recover. That also means if you are too far gone already, you will not recover in time before your Max HP reach 0, killing you.

I find that this could end up quite annoying to play with. With your provided numbers, assuming starting from neutral rate of change and staying at zero satiety, your health would be getting reduced, for example after four days, at a pretty pathetic rate of 1 HP/day for a total of 2 HP over those four days. But afterwards, keeping your satiety very high would still allow your maximum health to keep decreasing, by a total of 5 HP over 10 days, which could end up easily killing you in spite of perfect nutrition over that time period. It would seem rather questionable to die because you'd been starving two weeks earlier and didn't start recovering fast enough.

As much as I think I get the underlying idea behind this, I'm not sure that the numbers make any sense to me, unless maybe you make the delta rise and fall much faster and max out after at most ~1 day. Why not just make the rate of change directly dependent on the current satiety?

[Rainbow Fresh]

3 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

As much as I think I get the underlying idea behind this, I'm not sure that the numbers make any sense to me, unless maybe you make the delta rise and fall much faster and max out after at most ~1 day.

The numbers were, as mentioned, eyeballed. They do not need to be balanced - that is the job of the person actually implementing a system like this to do and testing to prove with possible configurability in mind. I just wanted to convey the general working of the proposed system in an easy manner.

4 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

Why not just make the rate of change directly dependent on the current satiety?

You mean if you satiety is at 50% nothing changes and if your satiety is at 100% you get maximum max health regeneration and at 0% maximum loss?

Because that would mean you always have to keep your hunger over 50% at all times no matter what or you slowly die. The point is not to make satiety bar even more of a nuisance but instead add a deeper, more complex system that keeps the punishing nature of "not eating food" while shifting away from the satiety bar being the sole indicator of life and death. I also think a lagging delta is more realistic, as you too would not just go from "weak and dying and critically malnourished" to "fit as a fiddle" just because you ate a full hearty stew today.

[MKMoose]

9 minutes ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

The numbers were, as mentioned, eyeballed. They do not need to be balanced - that is the job of the person actually implementing a system like this to do and testing to prove with possible configurability in mind. I just wanted to convey the general working of the proposed system in an easy manner.

It's not about balance. It's about the fundamental frustration of dying in spite of eating perfectly well, just because of the accumuated negative delta from a couple days back, with little to nothing that can be done about it.

 

1 minute ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

You mean if you satiety is at 50% nothing changes and if your satiety is at 100% you get maximum max health regeneration and at 0% maximum loss?

Because that would mean you always have to keep your hunger over 50% at all times no matter what or you slowly die. The point is not to make satiety bar even more of a nuisance but instead add a deeper, more complex system that keeps the punishing nature of "not eating food" while shifting away from the satiety bar being the sole indicator of life and death.

Or literally just take your suggested system, but instead of changing the rate of change, directly modify maximum health. Reduce it while satiety is at zero, and increase it while at above 50% satiety.

 

20 minutes ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

I also think a lagging delta is more realistic, as you too would not just go from "weak and dying and critically malnourished" to "fit as a fiddle" just because you ate a full hearty stew today.

In the current vanilla game, health already lags behind your satiety, and directly modifying maximum health would mean that it in turn would lag behind satiety. Both achieve or at least are capable of achieving everything you're saying your system would achieve, just with one fewer layer of integration.

[LadyWYT]

24 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

It's about the fundamental frustration of dying in spite of eating perfectly well, just because of the accumuated negative delta from a couple days back, with little to nothing that can be done about it.

Honestly, I'm not entirely against a consequence like this. I think the general idea here is that that kind of dire situation is something easily avoided in the first place--ie, the player deliberately put off securing a food supply in favor of doing other tasks, expecting to just eat a bowl of soup or two and make a quick recovery. Instead, what actually happens is the player ends up dying because they severely underestimated how dangerous starvation actually is.

 

1 hour ago, MKMoose said:

diseases (which I frankly don't get the point of

Having fiddled around with the mechanic both in VS and other games, the general idea behind disease is that it's primarily an environmental hazard, though also useful for punishing bad choices. For example, running around in the rain won't kill you, but it's not the best idea either, especially in colder weather, and can easily lead to catching a cold. A cold generally isn't life-threatening, but it could provide enough of a debuff that the player will want to heal it quickly and otherwise avoid doing things like running around in the rain or going for a swim in winter. Ignoring treatment and continuing to make poor decisions while having a cold could easily cause the cold to morph into a more serious condition such as pneumonia. I know in Morrowind, having a disease would penalize the player's personality attribute, making it much harder to barter and socialize with NPCs, so that could also be a factor as well.

It's also a good way to make certain climates like the tropics hazardous in a more unique way. Currently, the tropics and warmer climates are "easy mode" in terms of survival, since there's no cold weather to account for. Warm climates shouldn't be as difficult to survive in as colder ones, but they shouldn't exactly be walk in the park either.

[MKMoose]

4 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Honestly, I'm not entirely against a consequence like this. I think the general idea here is that that kind of dire situation is something easily avoided in the first place--ie, the player deliberately put off securing a food supply in favor of doing other tasks, expecting to just eat a bowl of soup or two and make a quick recovery. Instead, what actually happens is the player ends up dying because they severely underestimated how dangerous starvation actually is.

It's not like directly modifying maximum health can't do that, though. Eating a bowl or two of soup would recover just a bit of maximum health, but getting back to full could take many days.

 

4 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Having fiddled around with the mechanic both in VS and other games, the general idea behind disease is that it's primarily an environmental hazard, though also useful for punishing bad choices. For example, running around in the rain won't kill you, but it's not the best idea either, especially in colder weather, and can easily lead to catching a cold. A cold generally isn't life-threatening, but it could provide enough of a debuff that the player will want to heal it quickly and otherwise avoid doing things like running around in the rain or going for a swim in winter. Ignoring treatment and continuing to make poor decisions while having a cold could easily cause the cold to morph into a more serious condition such as pneumonia. I know in Morrowind, having a disease would penalize the player's personality attribute, making it much harder to barter and socialize with NPCs, so that could also be a factor as well.

Overall, it's rare to see this kind of thing in games. Even many realistic survival games don't bother, and for good reason. While I can't predict what the devs may want to do with it, the main problem of sorts I see with diseases is that I have yet to see a single suggestion that brings any meaningful detail to the table besides listing off the colorful variety of diseases that could be added, the means to contract them, and the consequences when untreated. You'd be lucky to see someone even mention possible treatments. While a lot can be done with interesting mechanics, diseases by themselves don't really have much of interest about them, and they don't strike me as something that contributes positively to fun gameplay.

I've thought about diseases, and my conclusion was that there are two possible ways to make them actually work:

• Make them into an important component of the game that interacts with other systems at a fundamental level, which the player engages with regularly and ideally also benefits from in some ways - from a realistic perspective it would basically no longer be a disease system. Temporal stability could move into that direction whenever if ever it gets revised, involving rust as a disease-like factor.
• Make them into a distinct threat associated with certain items, points of interest, biomes or whatnot, ideally as a counterbalance to something valuable which can also be found alongside it.
  • Peat, food and other resources in swamps and bogs, guarded by a swarm of disease-bearing insects.
  • Maybe something that can be contracted when mining specific ores - I'd need to look up what could realistically work for this.
  • Many poisonous plants could be used for a lot of different purposes - medicine, hunting, fishing, insecticide, and other stuff. Perhaps something like stinging nettle which could also be used for its fibers (not really a poison or disease, but kind of close). Technically that kind of applies to things like spoiled meat as well, but I don't think I can come up with any sort of benefit to match up with it. Keep in mind that the easier the disease is to avoid, the more pointless it becomes.

 

4 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

It's also a good way to make certain climates like the tropics hazardous in a more unique way. Currently, the tropics and warmer climates are "easy mode" in terms of survival, since there's no cold weather to account for. Warm climates shouldn't be as difficult to survive in as colder ones, but they shouldn't exactly be walk in the park either.

I'm curious if you're thinking of anything more specific.

Edited August 7 by MKMoose

[LadyWYT]

59 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

which the player engages with regularly and ideally also benefits from in some ways

This is probably why many games don't bother with it, beyond something so superficial/easy to deal with that one wonders why it exists in the first place. Diseases are annoying, and distinctly not beneficial to the player, but rather a hindrance. However, I would argue that not everything needs to always be beneficial to the player, or otherwise offer a positive consequence. 

Disease as a mechanic is something that, if the player is playing competently, shouldn't be encountered all that often. When it happens, it's going to be something fairly mild, like a cold, or a stroke of really bad luck. Aside from that, if the player is doing things like not bandaging injuries, eating raw meat, eating a poor diet, running around in the rain without rain gear, or going for a swim in cold weather...they're probably going to start having some issues as a result of those bad habits.

1 hour ago, MKMoose said:

I'm curious if you're thinking of anything more specific.

Mainly malaria and other insect-borne illnesses, although it could also cover parasites and bacterial infections as well. Solutions could range from making some sort of bug netting, to planting certain plants around your base to keep pests away, to creating some sort of bug repellent or otherwise trying not to linger in swamps and other places that insects like. Cooking meat thoroughly, avoiding eating too much bushmeat, and using clean water sources(if this even applies) are also possibilities.

There's also venomous animals to consider, as well as poisonous animals and plants. Additionally, certain animals are likely to carry certain diseases; it doesn't need to be anything as extreme as rabies, but diseases would be a great way to make the player think more carefully about how they deal wild animals, especially smaller, seemingly harmless ones. 

[MKMoose]

On 8/7/2026 at 11:50 PM, LadyWYT said:

However, I would argue that not everything needs to always be beneficial to the player, or otherwise offer a positive consequence. 

This is quite self-evident in many cases, but trivial to disagree with when it comes to core mechanics that the player is expected to engage with regularly, which is what I was menitoning in that case. A mechanic that is purely a detriment do the player and serves no other purpose simply doesn't work in that context.

 

On 8/7/2026 at 11:50 PM, LadyWYT said:

Disease as a mechanic is something that, if the player is playing competently, shouldn't be encountered all that often.

Thing is, though, if it's supposed to be purely detrimental, then it becomes more pointless the less common it is. If the mechanic is only relevant when the player is playing "incorrectly", then it doesn't seem to me that it warrants any significant development time. I hear people talk about making starvation mechanics more immersive, but as of late I don't even interact with them on new survival worlds - I practically never fall to zero satiety, at least on roughly standard settings.

If the diseases are supposed to be purely something that can be avoided by not making somewhat obvious mistakes like eating spoiled meat or eating too much of one food item, then I just don't see the point for the most part, because the current approach of making raw meat inedible and reducing the satiety of spoiled meat as well as incentivizing some variety through nutrition is quite functional already - if anything, I would like to see nutrition mechanics expanded to be more fun to play with, because that's at least a mechanic which I engage with regularly.

That is why I'm saying that disease could also be something that the player is expected to encounter specifically in association with certain biomes, points of interest or items. The disease can be designed as an integral balancing lever for whatever it's found alongside, and not something which makes the game less fun or more difficult for newer players while being entirely irrelevant for experienced players.

 

On 8/7/2026 at 11:50 PM, LadyWYT said:

Mainly malaria and other insect-borne illnesses, although it could also cover parasites and bacterial infections as well. Solutions could range from making some sort of bug netting, to planting certain plants around your base to keep pests away, to creating some sort of bug repellent or otherwise trying not to linger in swamps and other places that insects like.

I don't know if I can imagine particularly fun gameplay coming out of this. The best premodern methods (out of those that undeniably actually worked) of dealing with malaria and some similar diseases often boiled down to just avoiding high-risk areas or other known sources of disease. If someone contracted the disease, there was often little that could be done besides giving them ample rest, food and water, and hoping for the best (and often isolating them from others to prevent the spread of disease). Some herbal or other more unusual treatments could help, especially for example certain herbs as dewormers, though in many cases there was no actually reliable and effective treatments.

There's a chance that it would work well, but I can't help but think of diseases getting in the way to the point of having to avoid all water while in hot climates or having to fill out a checklist of the same specific countermeasures in every playthrough in those climates (mosquito nets are at least a relatively realistic thing, said to have been used prehistorically). Unless the risk is localized and clearly defined as well as ideally associated with some kind of reward, most likely in the form of resources that can be obtained in its vicinity, then it would easily just become a frustrating restriction instead of facilitating any sort of engaging gameplay.

And if you contract a disease, then what? Keep running around with debuffs? Sit about doing nothing in particular to make it go away faster? Hardly sounds like fun. I would point to two ideas here:

• Making diseases have no meaningful effects while at low strength could be borderline necessary to allow doing other things for a while when sick and while taking treatments, because otherwise it would feel awful to get debuffed and having to take a huge detour to deal with a disease and get back to whatever you actually wanted to do.
• Sleeping is the best thing that I can think of as a treatment method which greatly accelerates disease recovery - it would be a pretty flexible, immersive and realistic treatment in most cases, and it could be designed with a lot of secondary factors and progression in mind. And crucially, it would be fast, advancing time in the in-game world without forcing the player to just wait things out. Multiplayer servers would be a bit of a problem, where sleeping would likely have to be reworked in some ways, or some other form of resting or napping could be added to circumvent the issue of requiring everyone to sleep at the same time. Some diseases and especially parasites could have some more dedicated treatment methods, but sleep could still be helpful to at least reduce the symptoms for a while.

Edited August 10 by MKMoose

[LadyWYT]

2 hours ago, MKMoose said:

Thing is, though, if it's supposed to be purely detrimental, then it becomes more pointless the less common it is. If the mechanic is only relevant when the player is playing "incorrectly", then it doesn't seem to me that it warrants any significant development time. I hear people talk about making starvation mechanics more immersive, but as of late I don't even interact with them on new survival worlds - I practically never fall to zero satiety, at least on roughly standard settings.

This is true, to an extent, however, I wouldn't call detrimental mechanics entirely pointless. It's kind of like adding salt to cookie dough--a little is necessary to get the cookies to turn out right, but too much will ruin them. There's already mechanics in the game that are "pure detriment", since they don't really offer any benefit to the player and instead serve as punishment for failing to play the game properly. The player will freeze to death if they linger too long outside in the cold without a heat source or proper clothing. If the player ignores food, they starve to death. If the player jumps off a cliff, they can easily die from the fall.

However, the answer isn't to just remove those things simply because the player has no direct benefit. If there wasn't a risk of freezing, cold weather wouldn't really feel believable and the player would just run around doing what they please. Same goes for starvation and fall damage. Both are easily avoidable if the player is playing even the least bit "correctly", but accidents do happen and players sometimes miscalculate. That's when the consequences can catch up with them.

Same goes for penalizing the player for eating raw meat. It's not something the player should do, however, it's something they might do because they want to be lazy, or are otherwise desperate for food at the time. It also adds a little bit of immersion that doesn't really unbalance the game, at least as far as I can figure. Even Minecraft allows the player to eat things they really shouldn't, like raw chicken and rotten flesh, and suffer consequences for doing so.

I think it's also quite fair to note though, that many players also get realism confused with immersion. Yes, realism can help make a game more immersive, but at the end of the day it's still a game. In my opinion this is why a lot of starvation suggestions tend to fall flat--they operate under the assumption that making the mechanic more realistic will make it more fun and immersive, when that's possibly not the case.