Nutrition Overhaul

[Omega Haxors]

Right now Nutrition exists to give you extra health, though this is a very bad reward for maintaining good health, and here's why:

• The death penalty is to lose nutrition. Since this lowers your max health, it leads to situations where you might death loop.
• Extra health is only useful when in combat or taking fall damage. If you can avoid both, nutrition literally does not matter.
• It's extremely hard to notice your reward as you gain or lose progress, you have to actively stat-watch to even notice improvement.
• Makes it impossible to balance the damage output of monsters, since what might be fair for max-nutrition would instakill normal players.

Instead of buffing health, it makes more sense to buff a far more impactful stat to the game: Your speed. Here's why:

• Noticeable immediately. Even a small change to movement speed can be clocked by the player.
• Progression. Feel yourself get stronger as you improve your diet.
• Painful loss on death. Dying feels bad, but more importantly: doesn't meaningfully affect the balance of the game.
• Encourage Players to wear armor. Lower health means you have to rely more on armor, and increased speed counters armor downsides.
• Always useful. No matter what point in the game you are, being able to get around quicker is always appreciated.
• Edge in combat. A better-fed player will always outperform a worse-fed one by giving them a subtle edge.

As an added bonus, your break speed, jump height and cold resistance also increases with nutrition.
Finally, cooked foods no longer provide extra saturation but instead give boosted nutrition.
(This isn't 100% a related change, but almost everyone can agree that the saturation boost from cooking completely trivializes the hunger system.)

Edited November 24, 2021 by Omega Haxors

[Omega Haxors]

I would make this a mod but the amount of hard-coded stuff I would have to deal with makes it not an easy ordeal, but something I'd like to put on the table for later.

[Hal13]

Going with increased health does make sense though too, and the situations where losing max health means deathloop shouldn't work out another way if you lose speed or another stat relevant for combat. I mean if you gained speed by eating good you'd have to balance mobs against that instead of against increased health, which may result in mobs you can't outrun with 0 nutrition or always being able to outrun any foe with max nutrition. maybe diversifying the benefits is the way to go? if you get approx. +50% (of the default values) to HP and speed at max nutrition instead of nearly +100% to HP balancing should be easier...

And you don't lose all nutrition either by dying meaning as long as you don't die repeatedly you will be better of than someone newly joining the world.

It may be nice to actually have a benefit for not maxing out nutrition scores, idk, how about hungerrate and/or hungerdamage getting higher with better nutrition levels in addition to the benefits of more health and/or more speed? malnourished people tend to not feel the hunger as much as ones that are well fed. That way you might have an edge in combat for the malnourished player might have an edge through winter.

[Maelstrom]

I'm just confused how good nutrition in and of itself will increase someone's speed in real life?  Increased speed due to nutrition in game would make suspension of disbelief more difficult, whereas increased health is definitely related to real life.  Better nutrition leads to stronger immune system which could be argued as a component to HP.

[Heiress]

1 hour ago, Hal13 said:

... max nutrition. maybe diversifying the benefits is the way to go? if you get approx. +50% (of the default values) to HP and speed at max nutrition instead of nearly +100% to HP balancing should be easier...

...

No, with a stat like speed this will always be the case, though there is already not a single mob you cannot outrun pretty much (as far as I know anyway)

with speed and combat there are only ever 2 possible outcomes, either you are fast enough to kite, or you are not.

This is not the case with health as much, nothing really changes when you die, only how much hits you can take before you die again, avoiding to get hit is something you can actively do, you can't however speed up or go slower at will beyond sprinting.

As for deathloops though, neither boon will prevent a player from falling into them, if you die to a particular situation no matter what you are worse off for dealing with the situations ahead, either by being able to take less hits, or by not being able to dodge incoming blows as easily

One could argue that dying with nutrition affecting movement speed you are in fact penalised worse, as it impacts all aspects of the game including the speed at which you can retrieve your dropped loot (if you have that setting on).

[Hal13]

44 minutes ago, Maelstrom said:

how good nutrition in and of itself will increase someone's speed in real life?

That very much depends... Heavily malnourished people (and animals) tend to become sluggish to preserve the little energy they can muster. muscles are being more or less devoured by their own bodies too... But mostly i'd stay it's stamina they lack at some point, without a stamina mechanic one could say the running in VS isn't sprinting more like a faster jogging speed, then it would make sense that a well fed person can keep a higher speed (as long as they aren't too well fed).

57 minutes ago, Maelstrom said:

whereas increased health is definitely related to real life.  Better nutrition leads to stronger immune system which could be argued as a component to HP.

You wouldn't have to go as abstract as immune system... fat tissue does help with taking hits, it's rather likely that the gladiators (at least the ones who weren't in for getting slaughtered as death punishment) in ancient Rome were not only muscular but kept a healthy thick fat layer (at least according to what was found about their diet), fat tissue bleeds, the cut fat layer looks gross (both great entertainment in the arena), but if a blow only goes into the fat (literally a flesh wound) it wouldn't keep you from fighting and afterwards it heals rather quickly too.