Food/Hydration Overhaul

[Terramort]

Hi all, first suggestion here at 7 Days to Die. I read that hunger is getting something done to it for release 10, so I figured now would be a good time to get my ideas thrown out here. Please note that this isn't a "THIS NEEDS TO BE ADDED RIGHT NOW" type of suggestion, but rather, a collection of ideas that would help the game, in my humble opinion. Feel free to lift ideas, ignore parts, or even just ignore it all if it doesn't help create the perfect final game. - Why Change the Hunger? Hunger at this point doesn't seem very realistic. Of course, "not realistic" is a terrible excuse to trivially change any game mechanic, but in 7 Days to Die, the emphasis seems to be on immersive gameplay. I find myself either a.) constantly dying due to bad starting spawn and everything nearby looted/hunted, or b.) I have more than enough food to last forever. In either case, the required eating every 12 hours just to keep from starving to death seems rather invasive to good gameplay. - Why Change the Thirst? Thirst seems pretty well implemented right now, but a few minor tweaks, and it would very well along my proposed hunger changes. Changes to Hunger: 1. Reduce the speed at which the hunger drops slightly. Just enough so that it drops at a different rate than thirst. Right now there is almost no point in separating the two, other than to make it harder to find the correct resource. 2. Once Hunger hits 0, begin dropping the overall size of the Hunger meter. So instead of taking damage upon 0 Hunger, instead your Maximum Fullness potential begins to drop. Once you have food in your stomach again, the maximum size will start increasing. Minimum Hunger Meter should be about 1/4 of it's original size, over the course of about 3 days with no food and an empty Hunger Meter. 3. Once your hunger reaches 0, instead of taking direct damage, have other, less-tangible buffs happen to your character, and keep direct damage to Dehydration. Keep the mechanic that prevents your stamina from being fuller than your hunger meter, as well. Some ideas for hunger buffs: - 0 Hunger: As soon as you hit 0 Hunger, the max size of the Hunger Meter begins dropping. Your stomach also growls periodically, alerting nearby players and zombies. - 1 Day with 0 Hunger: A 10% movement/mining speed/health regen penalty is added. - 2 Days with 0 Hunger: Stomach grows happen more often. A 20% movement penalty/mining/regen speed is added. - 3 Days with 0 Hunger: Water Meter now drops 50% faster than before, and a 20% melee damage output reduction is added. - 7 Days with 0 Hunger: Water Meter drops 2x as fast. Movement/Mining/Damage/Regen penalty increased to 30%, as well as taking an extra 30% incoming damage. - 14 Days: Water Meter drops 2.5x as fast. Movement/Mining/Incoming & Outgoing Damage/Regen penalized 50%. - 21 Days: Water drops 3x as fast. Penalties set at 70% - 30 Days: Water drops 4x as fast. Penalties set at 90%. 4. Give food 2 Subcategories: Nutrients and Protein. Keep these as internal values so as to keep the UI as clean as possible, and give a little intangibility to the game instead of a straight number system. If either Nutrients or Protein are not at 100%, eating food only gives you a percent of what it should. (Example: Corn adds +15 fullness and +15 nutrients. As your hunger drops, your Protein will as well. Eating only Corn will not refill Protein. Once your hunger drops from 100 to 90, you only get 90% of Corn's food value, since you will only have 90% Protein and no way to refill.) Mixing and matching foods will be much more important, and the "easy" crops can have large Food value but low Nutrient/Protein worth, while rare + super healthy stuff (vitamin pills anyone?) will have very low Food value but greatly increase Nutrient/Protein fullness. 5. Give plants both a chance to fail growing, and for plants to have random amounts of food items (including 0). Also greatly increase the required grow time for plants (as in, 7+ days). 6. Add a new item (can opener). If any canned food is eaten without a can opener, it only gives 50% of what it should (due to some being lost in the process of bashing the can open). I think these 6 changes would greatly help to increase the immersion of 7 Days to Die, while at the same time adding a dynamic and fun mechanic. Then you won't NEED food, exactly, but going without it would be very detrimental to your character, putting you at a large disadvantage to those with food. Right now, food is super important. Because of this, it has to be somewhat common. And that in turn leads to food not really feeling as important as it should in a post apocalyptic world. These changes will allow food to be spawned MUCH more scarcely, without over-punishing new players (as well having the bonus of making air drops much more worth it). As well, this will make those disease causing foods much more viable (after a week or two without food). Currently, I lose health faster by eating bad food when starving then just taking the starving damage. With the new mechanics, you could eat bad food every so often to put off really bad effects in exchange for taking HP damage - but combined with slower and slower health regen, bad food would prolong the bad starving only so long, and you would have crap health + regen when you get there. The can opener combined with rarer food spawns will have most players at some level of starving unless they get lucky, so getting food will still be a heavy priority early game, and due to two different food reqs (nutrients and protein), you'll have to either find some rare protein growing plants/go hunting (if you farm), or else forage and trade for nutrients (if you hunt). Too Long; Didn't Read - Keep water deadly if you go without. Turn starvation into stronger and stronger debuffs the longer you go without food. Have food give you Food Value, Nutrient Value, and Protein Value. Reduce food spawning in the world. Reduce the effectiveness of plants. Essentially, until VERY well established, players should be starving or on the brink of starving, to simulate a real post-apocalypse world. Food shouldn't be needed to live, but needed to do well. Can opener required at beginning to get full can value, along with extra water drain penalty for hunger, will have players striving to find water sources over food just to stay alive, THEN attempting to expand.

[legolas141]

Interesting ideas, but I think you are going for way too complex of a hunger system. Also, given the variable game time settings, most of what you are talking about would not work so well. you can currently be into the end game gear and base building by the end of day 1 if you use the 240 min 24 hour cycle setting, so it would be entirely possible that you could complete all of your goals in game before you even felt hunger pains. While I do think you have to eat far too much currently, I also see no real benefit to making things as complex as you suggest. I think a better approach would be to make hunger degrade at maybe half the rate of thirst, unless you are really exerting your character, then you could have it drop faster. These settings would make managing your hunger even more of a focus than enjoying the core gameplay. which is the wrong direction in my opinion.

[AutoDMC]

Terramort, I really like your suggestions, as I feel that Hunger needs a little more work to be more than just another water bar. I agree with you that hunger should lead to debuffs, instead of death. As you get hungrier and hungrier you become less effective in the game. I think the key here is to go read the Wikipedia article on Starvation to get a better idea of how hunger differs from thirst. Thirst is a relatively simple body system; cells need a certain amount of water inside and outside the cell walls, waste is carried by water and emitted as sweat or urine, and therefore X amount of water needs to be taken in to keep the balance. Food, because of the digestive system, is a much more complex need. Somebody sitting in an office contemplating a trip to McDonalds may not consider it as very complex, but in a survival situation it can be really interesting to manage. However, I think your system might end up being too complex; I like the division into subgroups, but unless that data is conveyed somehow it can get frustrating. To simplify the system, however, I suggest that the Hunger bar be divided into two sub bars: Nutrition and Fullness Nutrition is a simple 1-100% linear progression; it's like the current hunger bar. It ticks down as a steady rate (say 1/2 to 1/3 the rate of water), and caps your stamena. Perhaps physical activities like running, fighting, and constructing would burn through this rate a bit faster. At 0%, you are "Starving" and start to die, like with water. Your chance of contracting diseases, zombie or waterbourne, could depend on your nutrition meter. Fullness, however, is a -100%<->+100% scale. The fullness meter decreases at a steady rate as your digestive system chews through your food, perhaps at the same rate as water.Fullness affects your debuffs and how much nutrition you can take in. Growling stomach debuffs set in the farther down you go into the negatives. Stamena recharge can slow down the hungrier you are based on fullness. Health regeneration, healing sprains and breaks, getting over other debuffs could require a positive fullness. Fullness over 90% might make you lethargic. The more full you are (and the more starving you are) the less effect food has for you. At 90% full or 90% starving, that can of ration you eat may only provide 20% of the nutrition it otherwise would have, but it provides 100% of the fullness it would have. So your goal is to keep your hunger hovering around "not hungry" (0%) while keeping your nutrition full. Why separate the meters like this? Not only does it make food a bit more complex, it allows you to do nasty things to somebody's food bar. For example, junk food and survival rations could provide lots of fullness but very little nutrition; useful to keep you running from the zombies but not very useful to you over all. Corn, a starch, would provide very little nutrition but as you. On the other hand, cooked meat provides you with plenty of nutrition but not as much fullness; however, the hunting process burns more nutrition than growing corn would. Under this system, looking in your box of provisions, you'd have choices. Stuff your face with corn to solve a hunger problem without much nutritional benefit, or eat your rare meat for the nutritional boost. Canned provisions are now more useful not only because they don't smell but also because they provide more nutrition per slot than survival food does (they're fortified). This would also require hunting to be a little more difficult (less meat from the animal, or more exertion/effort required to find a food bearing animal), but would make hunger an interesting stat, instead of just another bar to keep full.