Musings about food


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Post Tuesday, 20th December 2016, 13:00

Musings about food

Food.

Such a little word.

Such a catalysing subject.


Anyway, I have never been in the "remove food!" school, simply because there are a few functions that food has and are very hard to emulate in other ways. There are cases in which food is relevant, and adds to the game.

These are:

- spell hunger
- rod hunger
- hungry ghosts
- trolls
- ghouls
- vampires
- spriggans

Other situations are less important. The idea that food is needed to push people downwards isn't that good - there already are dangerous out of depth monsters whose spawn rate increases the long you remain on that floor, and these simply could not yield any XP, or drop items, or generate gold if you are with Gozag (or do they already work that way?). You could even have a signal like "the dungeon is getting restless from your waiting", and have the OOD monsters signalled somehow as e.g. "spectral", to justify the lack of drops.

So I can't but think:

- remove passive hunger (except for trolls and ghouls and possibly vampires)
- remove hunger caused by berserking (limited by exhaustion), melee fighting (it just doesn't matter), wielding a vampiric weapon (just make it make you swoon for a couple of turns instead), breath and spit (already limited by breath), blink and invisibility (already limited by contamination and glow), starting flight (it doesn't matter).
- I don't know enough about damnation and channelling to judge about these two.
- divine abilities have a better limit in piety than in food.
- make corpses inedible to most races.
- keep the limitations due to hunger level (no berserking if very hungry, no spells if starving, and so on).
- this is something I haven't fully thought of, but removal of death by hunger could be a good thing. It never happens anyway, and fainting status already has enough penalties.

This leaves the few cases I said earlier. Let's take a look at them.

- Spell and rod hunger mean that you need to make long term calculations. Keep them. It's a way to stop you from spamming high level spells like there's no tomorrow, and, if you get starving because of the spells you cast, it forces you to stop for a moment and eat something.

- Hungry ghosts are interesting as they trigger the hunger level limitations (stopping you from berserking etc). However, they should come in two variants: the normal, boring hunger ghost, as a teaching instrument for new players, and the greater hungry ghost, with a hunger-inducing passive radius, for the later dungeon.

- Spriggans could stay the way they are, just without passive hunger. It is a small (and unneeded) step up in power, but they already have a very slow metabolism. It can be countered by making bread appear less often.

- Trolls could maintain their passive hunger, and be one of the two races still allowed to eat corpses.

- Ghouls have eating meat as their shtick (curing rot and HP). But do they need passive hunger? I don't think so. They already have stat loss to worry about and force them in that direction.

- Vampires just need a rework, or at least the ability to vomit blood at will to decrease their nutrition level. (besides, as a dumb remark, vampires are supposed to drink the blood of living. What's the deal with corpses?)

Finally, one more proposal:

- allow to directly eat from corpses (before butchering), with one button stroke if possible. I always use 5 or o to eat because it's faster. Retain butchering for the advantage of ghouls.
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Post Tuesday, 20th December 2016, 13:21

Re: Musings about food

I'm altogether neutral on the subject of food, but I have to say that the idea of swooning over vampiric weapons is utterly amazing.

I mean, what's so special about vampiric people that they get all the unearthly beauty and elegant capes and aristocratic demeanor, while vampire animals and objects have nothing of the sort? Vampire weapons should be crafted and engraved so well that they can make you swoon as well as any Vlad, Lestat or Carmilla.

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Post Tuesday, 20th December 2016, 15:04

Re: Musings about food

I didn't really care about food before, but after playing hellcrawl I have to say that its removal is pretty much a good thing and playing normal crawl the constant pointless chopping is now annoying. Less hassle and the food itself is not really something does much of anything except annoy except in certain corner cases such as gozag or whatever.

However there are a ton of things to tweak so I doubt the devs tackle this any time soon. Various species would need to be tweaked (troll, kobold, spriggan etc), staff of energy and other evocables etc.

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Post Tuesday, 20th December 2016, 15:11

Re: Musings about food

I wander why the new option for autobuchering corpses is not turned on by default. It basically removed hunger from the game when I activated it, very similar to hellcrawl.
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Post Tuesday, 20th December 2016, 15:42

Re: Musings about food

We have discussed food countless times on here, it will never be removed. As far as I can tell, it has been determined that a mechanism is needed to force player progression and discourage arbitrarily long waiting outside of piety decay and OOD spawns. I doubt something like the passive hunger removal you mentioned would go in since passive hunger is really the point, the other things are just holdovers from Nethack.
remove food

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Post Tuesday, 20th December 2016, 15:49

Re: Musings about food

tabstorm wrote:it has been determined that a mechanism is needed to force player progression and discourage arbitrarily long waiting outside of piety decay and OOD spawns.


I believe this is wrong. It has been claimed, not determined. Add orb of fire to OOD spawn pool on D:1 if you don't trust me. It does not grant any XP/items of course.
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Post Tuesday, 20th December 2016, 16:13

Re: Musings about food

I take issue with the list in the OP. Food is not relevant(and does not add to the game) for spell hunger, barely does anything for rod hunger, doesn't do anything meaningful for hungry ghosts whatsoever(you just stop hitting it to eat something every now and then if the fight takes long enough, it doesn't actually ever put you in danger, just makes you hit e), is barely meaningful for trolls, for ghouls it just means you play as normal and the HP rot basically never ever matters even in postgame because it's so generous and chunks are plentiful(you just get extra healing outside of combat), and for vampires it is purely annoying kludge. Spriggans it matters a bit, but I have still never run out of food as a spriggan.

I have never in my life made "long term calculations" based around food and spell hunger, ever. I haven't seen anyone else do this either.

Remove hunger wholesale, then make later dungeon OoD spawns durably summoned so they don't give XP.

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Post Tuesday, 20th December 2016, 16:18

Re: Musings about food

Shard1697 wrote:Food is not relevant(and does not add to the game) for spell hunger, barely does anything for rod hunger, doesn't do anything meaningful for hungry ghosts whatsoever(you just stop hitting it to eat something every now and then if the fight takes long enough, it doesn't actually ever put you in danger, just makes you hit e)


I disagree with those. Spell hunger prevents me from playing the way I want (spamming high level spells with Vehumet), I created a thread complaining about being unable to use 4+ rods in a single fight before, hungry ghosts are dangerous sometimes (one summoned by curse skull stopped berserking of my treeform character and almost killed it)
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Post Tuesday, 20th December 2016, 19:08

Re: Musings about food

Now there's a big part of me that would like food to be fixed in quantity, with only fruits to be found randomly around the dungeon (and corpses, if you are a ghoul or a troll). All the rest of the food is handed to you when you begin the game and some more is given you when you descend for the first time into the Depths, Zot and each of the Hell Kingdoms. Pan and Abyss would keep having free food like now.
So you can (must) actually do some long-term thinking, because you know what quantities you are talking about.

This would have some funny effects. One is that trolls and ghouls would be unlimited casters (or rod users) before postend.
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Post Tuesday, 20th December 2016, 19:14

Re: Musings about food

We'd have some unfunny effects also. Casters spend more food (spell hunger, longer rest to regenerate MP, more luring). If there is just enough permafood for MiGl of Makhleb, OpFE will starve. If there is enough food for OpFE, MiGl can scum for XP/items. That's why I believe treating food as reason to push character forward will never work.
I still don't understand why devs don't want to remove XP/items/corpses from OOD and let players see it in game.
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Post Tuesday, 20th December 2016, 19:31

Re: Musings about food

VeryAngryFelid wrote:We'd have some unfunny effects also. Casters spend more food (spell hunger, longer rest to regenerate MP, more luring). If there is just enough permafood for MiGl of Makhleb, OpFE will starve. If there is enough food for OpFE, MiGl can scum for XP/items. That's why I believe treating food as reason to push character forward will never work.
I still don't understand why devs don't want to remove XP/items/corpses from OOD and let players see it in game.


Then book starts could get more food than the others at the beginning (although it still means that a gladiator will have troubles hybridizing later, giving background selection more weight than it currently has). Generally however I was thinking in the frame of the proposals in the OP, so e.g. resting and moving around wouldn't cause hunger. Food would pretty much only exist to influence spell and rod management, and hunger level to influence the available choices (v.h.: no berserk, st.: no spells...).

As for pushing people forward, I fully agree with your view. Durably summoned OoD monsters are the best option.
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Post Tuesday, 20th December 2016, 19:39

Re: Musings about food

Shtopit wrote:Generally however I was thinking in the frame of the proposals in the OP, so e.g. resting and moving around wouldn't cause hunger. Food would pretty much only exist to influence spell and rod management, and hunger level to influence the available choices (v.h.: no berserk, st.: no spells...).


What is the intent here? Tactical limit (no more than N berserks in a given fight) or strategic limit (no more than N berserks per map level or XL)?
The same question for spells - no more than (spellcasting * m) fireballs per meat ration?
Current crawl is weird here, we are usually not limited strategically in spellcasting in branches with chunks except sometimes we are unlucky with chunks and are very limited.
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Post Wednesday, 21st December 2016, 02:24

Re: Musings about food

Strategic limit, and almost only for spells and rods, with the minor tactical effect of sometimes having to use a turn or two to eat if you cast to starvation and need to cast more. I think berserker already works fine with just exhaustion to limit it. It isn't hunger that will kill you, it is being slow while still surrounded (and not being able to read or evoke or quaff can be deadly as well).
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Post Wednesday, 21st December 2016, 03:07

Re: Musings about food

Basically the only time hunger was an issue for me was on a Spriggan spellcaster of Gozag with whom I had found a bunch of cool rods, so I opted to train evocation instead of melee. I thought I would be fine for food because I was using Gozag but I started having serious food problems around my first rune, and was having to use all of my gold on summoning food shops and raiding them for any rations or fruit. I got bored and angry with this character pretty soon thereafter and basically suicided him. It was like my god power was "don't die of hunger", giving me nothing else.

I have PTSD now and I don't think I will ever be able to play a Spriggan again.

I don't know what my point is, except to say that being in that situation where you're on the brink of starvation and you literally can't kill enough people with Gozag to pay for the hunger cost of killing them in the first place is a truly un-fun place to be in. Maybe this happens only on Spriggans, but even just the spectre of having this happen to me again is enough for me to never train evocation for the purpose of using rods again. Might as well just train a weapon for more straightforward, less annoying gameplay all around.

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Post Wednesday, 21st December 2016, 07:27

Re: Musings about food

tankra wrote:I don't think I will ever be able to play a Spriggan again.


This is caused by Gozag, not by Spriggan. Welcome to "Gozag is the least fun god" club.
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Post Wednesday, 21st December 2016, 09:43

Re: Musings about food

By the time devs are done with the game you won't be doing anything except pressing tab to play. Talk about Tedium. I'm only seeing the game get more boring. I feel that ppl that whine about tedium just want to speed the game up.

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Post Tuesday, 27th December 2016, 13:54

Re: Musings about food

Right because the game is too slow and takes too long to win

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Post Tuesday, 27th December 2016, 14:32

Re: Musings about food

Replace all sources of hunger with drain or contam

Remove food

Problem solved
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Post Tuesday, 27th December 2016, 16:05

Re: Musings about food

lethediver wrote:Replace all sources of hunger with drain or contam

Remove food

Problem solved

ftfy. There's no need to replace hunger costs with anything.

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Post Tuesday, 27th December 2016, 16:53

Re: Musings about food

Yup. Hellcrawl proved that. But this my middle ground solution for people who are still laboring under the delusion that hunger/food are currently significant.

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Post Wednesday, 28th December 2016, 00:09

Re: Musings about food

VeryAngryFelid wrote:I wander why the new option for autobuchering corpses is not turned on by default. It basically removed hunger from the game when I activated it, very similar to hellcrawl.

Necromancers and Fedhas, basically.

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Post Wednesday, 28th December 2016, 04:52

Re: Musings about food

PleasingFungus wrote:
VeryAngryFelid wrote:I wander why the new option for autobuchering corpses is not turned on by default. It basically removed hunger from the game when I activated it, very similar to hellcrawl.

Necromancers and Fedhas, basically.



Is it possible to give a message "Do you want to turn autobutchering off" when learning Animate Foo or joining Fedhas if the option is on?
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Post Wednesday, 28th December 2016, 15:10

Re: Musings about food

VeryAngryFelid wrote:
PleasingFungus wrote:
VeryAngryFelid wrote:I wander why the new option for autobuchering corpses is not turned on by default. It basically removed hunger from the game when I activated it, very similar to hellcrawl.

Necromancers and Fedhas, basically.



Is it possible to give a message "Do you want to turn autobutchering off" when learning Animate Foo or joining Fedhas if the option is on?

Or make it entirely toggleable in-game, like autopickup is
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Post Wednesday, 28th December 2016, 15:37

Re: Musings about food

To everyone who has any degree of sympathy towards food I suggest playing a few games of HellCrawl. It's liberating, refreshing and the lack of food makes everything better. It's one of the last few frustrating mechanics in the game.

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Post Wednesday, 28th December 2016, 20:45

Re: Musings about food

TonberryJam wrote:I feel that ppl that whine about tedium just want to speed the game up.


Hell yeah I do.

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Post Thursday, 29th December 2016, 17:44

Re: Musings about food

asdu wrote:
TonberryJam wrote:I feel that ppl that whine about tedium just want to speed the game up.


Hell yeah I do.

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Post Thursday, 2nd February 2017, 13:58

Re: Musings about food

Dearest Steve
thanks for the gym equipment
the plane crashed
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Post Thursday, 2nd February 2017, 14:04

Re: Musings about food

FR: poisonous fruit. Sometimes when you eat a piece of fruit, you become poisoned. The more hungry you are, the more probable it is for the fruit to be poisonous.
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Post Thursday, 9th February 2017, 16:19

Re: Musings about food

What.


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