Realistic Hunger/Nutrition

[Mikel Monleón]

I thought it was odd that you could heal yourself from starvation with a poultice. I also find that after attaining temporal gears, food becomes very obsolete. You can just re-spawn and reset your stats, so eating becomes meaningless.
A work around could be to not have starvation deal damage, but rather it lower your stats gradually instead. Punishing people with lowered stats would incentivize players to stay well fed.

I imagine it like this:

HUNGER

Having your hunger bar depleted causes your damage resistance, running speed, mining speed and damage dealt to begin to gradually decline. 
The longer your green bar is empty, the more severe this becomes. After a while, players would become encumbered, and would walk very very slowly. Hitting the run key would cause him/her to only slowly jog for a brief period.
I don't think a player should not be able to run, especially if in a life and death situation. Maybe there could be a hidden adrenaline system that allows players to receive temporary boosted running speed stats when they receive damage.

Perhaps after a few game days of having an empty hunger bar, they could suddenly die of hunger. 

NUTRITION

As the game stands with nutritional values, It's a bit odd how dairy is required to be healthy, when it's arguably not in real life.
I would suggest to remove all 4 nutritional stats and combine them as a single measurement, and instead, reward players with increased max health (or perhaps other stats) when they eat a wide diversity of foods. For example a diet that has a mixture of different grains, vegetables or fruits would increase nutrition more quickly. This would also justify being vegan or vegetarian in the game (though cheeses and protein could fill up your hunger meter more). I'm not suggesting that players need to eat vegetables to be healthy, they just would need more variety. I imagine having a diet of just one type of vegetable (lets say cabbage) or a diet that's entirely made up of just grains would not cause the player to get stat boosts, and perhaps even get penalized (reduced stats).

I think this wouldn't be difficult to implement, and players would naturally for the most part eat healthy unknowingly. But for those who are aware the mechanic, and manage to maintain a good diet, they could then be rewarded with more quick, permanent stat boosts. 

Edited December 18, 2020 by Mikel Monleón