Saturn Tiberian

A wide variety of animals engaged in persistence hunting (chasing faster prey to exhaustion), including early humans. Of course more efficient methods were preferred if they had the option. Which would be more than provided for by a full-grown deer... unless the player character has the metabolism of a blue whale. And why does my character go from fully satiated to literally dying after sitting still for a day without food? You can't rationalize this one with "realism", it's actually very unrealistic. Now the "muh realism" cope is sidelined, we can mobilize the "balance" cope. The game wouldn't be "balanced" if the player could stockpile decent quantities of necessary resources through hunting-gathering. He must be constantly forced to drop what he is doing to gather food until he acquires agriculture because: Hunting in the real world was far less time consuming than early agriculture. Hunter-gatherers had better access to nutrition than their early agricultural descendants. They didn't switch over to agriculture for ease or convenience, they did so because it provided a higher density of caloric energy in a given area, which allowed a larger population to grow, which could then outnumber and militarily dominate their neighbors. Interestingly, the Neolithic corresponds with the extinction of the Neanderthal species. Neanderthals were taller and better suited for hunter-gathering, however, they reproduced slower than their Homo sapiens counterparts, who were victorious not because their lifestyle was objectively beneficial to their health and well-being, but because they could outnumber their enemies. And thus they replaced their enemies. I will avoid relating this to modern politics.

Satiety should be related to kcal at least a little if they want it to be realistic, body weight and starvation is pretty straightforwardly derived from calories in and calories out. Having the food sources give different "areas" like meat, plants etc. is good but I would split it into macronutrients (protein/fat/carb) instead of plant/bread/etc to model agricultural nutrient deprivation (lack of animal nutrients) and rabbit starvation (lack of fat). Personally I think they should make food sources more valuable but scarcer. A prehistoric human would travel a fairly large area, maybe hitting a berry bush they know about, an animal trail, a trap, a river, etc. Having the player travel a larger area between food sources (which you could mark on your map, each of which would satiate them for at least a day) would model this while also encouraging exploration and a more "nomadic" playstyle. I should be able to ignore food for a day or two and go hog wild on berries or a deer and be fine. Then when you start doing agriculture you can build up a more stationary base. This is probably formed by your eating habits. If you eat 3 meals a day your body will adapt to it vs. one meal a day. it's not like a hunter gatherer was eating a steady breakfast lunch and dinner

Vintage Story has an absurd model of prehistoric food. Meat yields of large animals are extremely inaccurate. A single deer realistically contains about 50lbs of harvestable meat. In the game you receive barely enough bushmeat for a couple bars of hunger. The dried meat that was a staple of prehistoric human diets is almost entirely useless. A rabbit has 3-4lbs of meat(2,300-3,000kcal), in-game it gives you one bar of hunger. If we look at my in game character's hunger rate (depleting the entire 15 tick hungerbar in approx. 1 in game day standing literally entirely still and AFK), this would give a TDEE of 30,000-45,000kcal, roughly equivalent to an African elephant. Prehistoric humans could survive on the caloric content of rabbits so long that a form of nutrient deprivation known as "rabbit starvation" could set in. I encourage you to try and survive on only rabbit meat for months on end in-game. They give you a single bar of hunger and you will have to chase or shoot them with arrows since you cannot construct snares or traps. Very "realistic"! This 5000 calorie diet would correspond to around 3lbs of bread, or two loaves. How many loaves do you have to eat in game? I am not a stickler for realism in games. They are meant to be interesting and fun above all else. But it is a pet peeve of mine when "realistic" games make straightforward tasks difficult or annoying. Your prehistorical ancestors literally chased animals all day on foot until they passed out from exhaustion and clubbed them for food (the "you hold the sprint button" argument refuted). But in the game you can barely survive on a vast quantity of food while walking everywhere and barely doing anything.