What food category would corn belong to in game?

[SnapJelly]

For context:

1) Botanically speaking corn is a fruit
2) In modern day people mostly treat and eat it as a vegetable
3) Historically corn was mostly treated as a grain (and still a bit today for things like cornbread and corn chips etc)

So if corn is added as a crop in game, what nutrition type do you think it should add?

[Zaph42nd]

Grain probably given that corn's historical (and modern) usage, although I'm not sure how it'd fit into the crops of VS since corn is a new-world crop (Americas) and would probably end up saturating the already pretty large list of grains. I do see its usage for alcohol-making and of course for breads, stews, etc...

[SnapJelly]

1 minute ago, Zaph42nd said:

I'm not sure how it'd fit into the crops of VS since corn is a new-world crop

Well cassava is already in game and that's also a new world crop

[SnapJelly]

6 minutes ago, Zaph42nd said:

and would probably end up saturating the already pretty large list of grains

I also don't think the list of grains is that saturated tbh man, there's 7 grains in game and 4 of them are limited to warm climates

For comparison there are 10 types of berry and 11 types of tree fruit + pineapples and cactus fruit for a total of 23 fruits currently

Edit: and honey also counts as fruit!

Edited August 24 by SnapJelly

[MKMoose]

13 minutes ago, Zaph42nd said:

I'm not sure how it'd fit into the crops of VS since corn is a new-world crop

VS has had many New World plants and animals for a long time now.

 

23 minutes ago, SnapJelly said:

1) Botanically speaking corn is a fruit
2) In modern day people mostly treat and eat it as a vegetable
3) Historically corn was mostly treated as a grain (and still a bit today for things like cornbread and corn chips etc)

Botanical definitions are irrelevant to nutritional categories, and the devs have said about as much. For the distinction between vegetable and grain, cassava has created the precedent for grinding a vegetable into flour to make it a grain, so if that's not an oversight then corn can follow suit.

Edited August 24 by MKMoose

[SnapJelly]

3 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

cassava has created the precedent for grinding a vegetable into flour to make it a grain, so if that's not an oversight then corn can follow suit.

Yeah this would be my choice as well, I should've allowed for multiple choices in the poll  mb

[PhotriusPyrelus]

2 hours ago, SnapJelly said:

For context:

1) Botanically speaking corn is a fruit
2) In modern day people mostly treat and eat it as a vegetable
3) Historically corn was mostly treated as a grain (and still a bit today for things like cornbread and corn chips etc)

So if corn is added as a crop in game, what nutrition type do you think it should add?

What does it bear most resemblance to nutritionally?

EDIT:  Nutrition in this game probably needs an overhaul from basically the 5 "food groups" (except 'protein' instead of meat).

Potato (which isn't yet in the game, but I can hope!), for example would be classified as a "vegetable", but nutritionally it bears almost no resemblance to other vegetables and is more correctly categorized as a starch...but there is no 'starch' category in the game.

EDIT 2: Digging around a little in nutrition, it seems like maybe Protein, Fat, Starch, Sugar, and Fiber would be good replacements.  How convenient, there's five of them!

Edited August 24 by PhotriusPyrelus

[SnapJelly]

2 hours ago, PhotriusPyrelus said:

EDIT 2: Digging around a little in nutrition, it seems like maybe Protein, Fat, Starch, Sugar, and Fiber would be good replacements.  How convenient, there's five of them!

Well the foodgroups in game are not there for realism reasons, they exist for gameplay reasons. Aka they are made to incentivise the player to interact with the different mechanics in the game.

Dairy for example isn't a food group because nurtitionally cheese is something a person needs, but because the way to get it requires a lot of setup, which makes it lend itself as a late-game food automatically. If cheese didn't have a seperate foodgroup but required the same effort to make there won't be very much reason for the player to even attempt it, but because it is a foodgroup players are pushed to go find salt, catch and breed animals, pickle vegetables, keep bees for wax, get plenty of linen, set up rooms for ripening bla bla bla you get my point

[PhotriusPyrelus]

7 minutes ago, SnapJelly said:

Well the foodgroups in game are not there for realism reasons, they exist for gameplay reasons. Aka they are made to incentivise the player to interact with the different mechanics in the game.

Dairy for example isn't a food group because nurtitionally cheese is something a person needs, but because the way to get it requires a lot of setup, which makes it lend itself as a late-game food automatically. If cheese didn't have a seperate foodgroup but required the same effort to make there won't be very much reason for the player to even attempt it, but because it is a foodgroup players are pushed to go find salt, catch and breed animals, pickle vegetables, keep bees for wax, get plenty of linen, set up rooms for ripening bla bla bla you get my point

You can milk a goat pretty early, can't you?  If you're just looking to fill out your dairy satiety bar, that'll do it, won't it?

[SnapJelly]

11 minutes ago, PhotriusPyrelus said:

You can milk a goat pretty early, can't you?

you have to first catch both a male and a female goat, then you have to wait for the female to get pregnant and have her baby which takes 20 days or 2.2 in game months.

Then when the baby is born the female will be lactating for 20 days but for the first generation there is a 95% chance she will reject the milking and attack you instead.

However if you do manage to milk her you can milk her for 10 liters every 24 hours, this milk however will only stay good for 8 days so you can not really rely on milk to keep your dairy full unless you have a large quantity of goats that are 3 generations old and are constantly pregnant. So yeah, several months...

Edited August 25 by SnapJelly
Spelling error

[PhotriusPyrelus]

9 minutes ago, SnapJelly said:

for the first generation there is a 95% chance she will reject the milking and attack you instead.

However if you do manage to milk her you can milk her for 10 liters every 24 hours, this milk however will only stay good for 8 days so you can not really rely on milk to keep your dairy full unless you have a large quantity of goats that are 3 generations old and are constantly pregnant.

Ahhh yeah, I didn't know all that stuff.  I haven't done much with husbandry.

I was thinking 3 goats, 1M, 2F.  While one F is lactating, the other should be pregnant.  Didn't know (or forgot) about the generational taming.

[LadyWYT]

I voted grain, since it serves the same general purpose as grain, and it would be pretty odd to have alcohol with vegetable nutrition, of all things.

[SnapJelly]

9 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

and it would be pretty odd to have alcohol with vegetable nutrition, of all things.

Vodka entered the chat!

[Demoncyborg]

i'm confused that grain is winning, but i went vegetable, based off Cassava also being counted as vegetable despite functioning as a grain

edit: I like what MKmoose said, turning it to grain when it becomes flour like Cassava too.

and now i wonder if it's introduced are we getting a one-corn-fits-all? will we have feed corn and dent corn? you cant just mill any old corn you find.

Edited August 25 by Demoncyborg

[Rezerkity]

It's a great candidate for being a food that just satiates multiple categories, grain fruit and vegetable

[SnapJelly]

54 minutes ago, Rezerkity said:

It's a great candidate for being a food that just satiates multiple categories, grain fruit and vegetable

Generally I'd be against such a thing, It would likely cause people to only ever grow that single crop cuz it fills must every need

[PhotriusPyrelus]

17 minutes ago, SnapJelly said:

It would likely cause people to only ever grow that single crop cuz it fills must every need

Aren't soil nutrients are still a thing?  So if you wanna grow a mono crop you have to spend a lot more effort in fertilization (or finding/making new soil), when you could just be doing crop rotation.

[SnapJelly]

1 minute ago, PhotriusPyrelus said:

Aren't soil nutrients are still a thing?  So if you wanna grow a mono crop you have to spend a lot more effort in fertilization (or finding/making new soil), when you could just be doing crop rotation.

Yeah debatably, it would take a while for the nutrients to come back on their own but at the same time it's not like there is a lack of dirt in the game so you could always just either get more or move your farm over a single block ya know?

The crop rotation thing compliments the nutrition system as it works now because it makes you think about which crops to plant next if which areas, since you're going to need different types of crop anyway you might aswell rotate them.

[PhotriusPyrelus]

Well yeah, but that requires uglifying some part of your world, or maybe you've built up around your farm and can't really just move it conveniently.

I also think you're making an assumption that it would fill all three bars at the same rate.  It certainly should not do that.  Grain weighted, vegetable at like half that, maybe, and a little bit of fruit? (though honestly, I don't think it needs 'fruit' at all, as nutritionally corn has almost nothing in common with fruits).

[LadyWYT]

1 hour ago, PhotriusPyrelus said:

So if you wanna grow a mono crop you have to spend a lot more effort in fertilization (or finding/making new soil), when you could just be doing crop rotation.

Crop disease. It's not in the game, but it's not an uncommon suggestion either. For the most part, I don't think the concept makes for very fun gameplay, however, I do think it would be a good way to deter long-term monoculture. The more the player plants the same crop in the same farm tile, the more likely it is that the crop will succumb to disease and be lost.

 

3 hours ago, Rezerkity said:

It's a great candidate for being a food that just satiates multiple categories, grain fruit and vegetable

It should only be able to do this via processing(ie, turn it into alcohol or flour for baked goods). But even then, it only makes sense for the vegetable and grain categories. Fruit makes no sense here, because corn is only considered a fruit in the botanical sense, and not the conventional. 

[MKMoose]

2 hours ago, PhotriusPyrelus said:

Aren't soil nutrients are still a thing?  So if you wanna grow a mono crop you have to spend a lot more effort in fertilization (or finding/making new soil), when you could just be doing crop rotation.

You can also just do a fallow rotation without pointlessly replacing or fertilizing the soil. Leave the fields empty for however long they need to recover - having to clear the grass afterwards is the only potentially meaningful drawback. If necessary, use a couple separate fields and rotate between them for better short-term food security.