Replace permafood with a single generic food item

[That Other Guy]

Now that all food takes the same amount of time to eat, is there any compelling reason to still have 4 types of permafood? Making food generic would make inventory management slightly easier, so the player could lose two or three slots to counteract this. The nutrition value of a hypothetical food item could be what a ration is now, or slightly lower to make up for the elimination of low nutrition food. Alternatively, food could be two items, one high nutrition and one low. (A meal, and a snack). If this change brings up an issue for Spriggans having access to more food, they could lose one rank of slow metabolism.

I still recognize that the food sprites are cute, though, so if at all possible a generic food item should cycle through sprites like the current fruit item does.

EDIT: Another solution for Spriggans could be giving them 60-70% nutrition from each item. This could be accompanied by a message like "There's less food left once you pick out all the meat"

[PowerOfKaishin]

Turn everything into Soylent Green.

[neil]

I have some plans for this, but they probably won't happen in 0.20. All numbers below would have to be tuned, but that can be done with objstat and some arithmetic so as not to change the total amount of food.

• Merge permafood into a single item, "ration", that is N% of the size of a current bread ration.
• Replace food in vaults with the equivalent nutrition worth of newrations, assuming no diet mutations.
• (maybe) Allow vault renames of "ration" for Flavour Reasons. They would still merge in inventory.
• Make carnivore and herbivore single-level mutations:
  
  • Carnivore grants X% nutrition from permafood, allows eating chunks when full.
  • Herbivore grants Y% nutrition from permafood, prevents eating chunks.
• Have Fedhas abilities use newrations rather than fruit. Depending on balance, this might be one or more newrations: newrations will presumably be more common than fruit currently are.

[Shtopit]

I think it would be cool if soup came into being in the game (you see here a can of soup), although that's just a flavour quirk of mine.

[duvessa]

I think Fedhas abilities shouldn't use food at all with this change - the nutrition you got from fruits was insignificantly small, it was never a real trade-off. Functionally, fruits were an item that you only used for Fedhas abilities and weren't useful for anything else. And it's not really going to become an interesting tradeoff, since losing permafood either does nothing or outright kills you, and the latter wouldn't even happen much because you only need permafood about 5 times per game even if you're playing clumsily.
If growth and oklobs need a more permanent cost than piety (not really convinced they do, especially growth; it's mushrooms that need a nerf), perhaps they could inflict rotting, flavoured as using some of your own life force to make/upgrade the plants?

[Quazifuji]

If food's being condensed to two just chunks and rations, is there any chance it could be goldified and not exist in your inventory? Most characters would just always carry around rations so that does nothing but just give you one less inventory slot. Meanwhile, the decision of whether to leave an inventory slot open for chunks or not is almost entirely about picking between different types of inconvenience that come from carrying or not carrying chunks.

Ultimately, if rations and chunks stopped taking up inventory space I think nothing would be lost except some annoying inventory management and autopickup prompts.

[Floodkiller]

I have some plans for this, but they probably won't happen in 0.20. All numbers below would have to be tuned, but that can be done with objstat and some arithmetic so as not to change the total amount of food.

• Merge permafood into a single item, "ration", that is N% of the size of a current bread ration.
• Replace food in vaults with the equivalent nutrition worth of newrations, assuming no diet mutations.
• (maybe) Allow vault renames of "ration" for Flavour Reasons. They would still merge in inventory.
• Make carnivore and herbivore single-level mutations:
  
  • Carnivore grants X% nutrition from permafood, allows eating chunks when full.
  • Herbivore grants Y% nutrition from permafood, prevents eating chunks.
• Have Fedhas abilities use newrations rather than fruit. Depending on balance, this might be one or more newrations: newrations will presumably be more common than fruit currently are.

I would love if this could be combined with an rcfile option to rename 'newration' to the name of your choice.

[bel]

If oklobs need a nerf, they could perhaps be made to time out after a (fairly long) duration, instead of just costing piety.

[duvessa]

I would love if this could be combined with an rcfile option to rename 'newration' to the name of your choice.

Only if you also prevent it from showing up in morgues and other game data. Otherwise people will deliberately kill themselves with a thrown butt/penis/[name of other item] etc. and pollute a bunch of Sequell fields and greps.

[tasonir]

I don't think you'd need to compensate for being able to carry an extra 1-3 item slots, the limit of 52 is more because that's the limit of the upper and lower case alphabet, and not because 52 is the right number for gameplay. I'd agree that if this goes through with a single "ration" item and "chunk" as the only two possible food items, that inventory juggling will be significantly easier, but that's more of a quality of life buff than a raw power buff. Carrying cancellation (one of the first ones that I usually drop) will be slightly helpful but I bet I'll probably just finish runs without ever having come across a situation where I needed to quaff cancellation, despite having them.

[yesno]

I have some plans for this, but they probably won't happen in 0.20. All numbers below would have to be tuned, but that can be done with objstat and some arithmetic so as not to change the total amount of food.

• Merge permafood into a single item, "ration", that is N% of the size of a current bread ration.
• Replace food in vaults with the equivalent nutrition worth of newrations, assuming no diet mutations.
• (maybe) Allow vault renames of "ration" for Flavour Reasons. They would still merge in inventory.
• Make carnivore and herbivore single-level mutations:
  
  • Carnivore grants X% nutrition from permafood, allows eating chunks when full.
  • Herbivore grants Y% nutrition from permafood, prevents eating chunks.
• Have Fedhas abilities use newrations rather than fruit. Depending on balance, this might be one or more newrations: newrations will presumably be more common than fruit currently are.

sounds like a definite improvement. i hope it eventually leads to merging chunks and rations completely someday... let there be a % chance that killing an edible enemy adds food to your supply (where edibility depends on your species' metabolism). or retain chunks and rations and various food types (for flavor), but picking up edible chunks adds their value in nutrition to an extra-inventory account (picking up inedible food just puts gray items in your inventory).

[Lasty]

My implementation preference would be to have all food items appear as they do now while laying on the ground (or maybe even more varied than now), but have them all merge into one "food ration" or even just "food unit" in the inventory. Better still, goldify them: "Food: 43."

[archaeo]

It's been a few months since I talked about removing food, right?

• Merge permafood into a single item, "ration", that is N% of the size of a current bread ration.
• Replace food in vaults with the equivalent nutrition worth of newrations, assuming no diet mutations.
• (maybe) Allow vault renames of "ration" for Flavour Reasons. They would still merge in inventory.
• Make carnivore and herbivore single-level mutations:
  
  • Carnivore grants X% nutrition from permafood, allows eating chunks when full.
  • Herbivore grants Y% nutrition from permafood, prevents eating chunks.
• Have Fedhas abilities use newrations rather than fruit. Depending on balance, this might be one or more newrations: newrations will presumably be more common than fruit currently are.

My implementation preference would be to have all food items appear as they do now while laying on the ground (or maybe even more varied than now), but have them all merge into one "food ration" or even just "food unit" in the inventory. Better still, goldify them: "Food: 43."

Note that Lasty's last sentence here is the result of following neil's proposal to its logical conclusion. There's no reason for food to occupy inventory space if it's just going to be a permanent stack within it; that's the equivalent of giving the player 51 inventory slots (or 50 if chunks and permafood will be different) because for some reason, the game clock is an item the player carries around.

Of course, goldified food is only marginally better, given that it has now automated a skeuomorphic clock to the point that its skeuomorphism makes no sense. It also ignores the problem of a clock that can't ever be tuned to be of any real interest to the average player thanks to the wide variance between combos (and everything else in a procedurally generated game, for that matter), as well as the problem of hunger killing players in a way that deliberately makes it hard for them to see where they made a mistake, since said mistake was a strategic one likely made hundreds or thousands of turns prior. It further ignores the problem of food not actually accomplishing anything in the myriad systems it's tied to, and by further automating the process, it'll even prevent the starvation deaths that happen out of sheer inattention (which probably constitute a significant portion of said deaths).

Once more, with feeling: removing food is the only logical course of action. Better clocks exist, if we absolutely must have one.

[mrob]

let there be a % chance that killing an edible enemy adds food to your supply

If this means the end of chunk decay I'm all for it. The current system means optimal play requires tracking exactly how much nutrition you have and deciding whether you're going to kill each edible enemy immediately or keep them alive so you can eat them later.

[Quazifuji]

I believe they tried an experimental branch in the past where chunks were removed but enemies had a chance to drop permafood and it was rejected. I don't know all the details of why, just that it's been tried and the devs decided it didn't work.

[Rast]

My implementation preference would be to have all food items appear as they do now while laying on the ground (or maybe even more varied than now), but have them all merge into one "food ration" or even just "food unit" in the inventory. Better still, goldify them: "Food: 43."

I would prefer to keep the distinction between food that carnivores can't eat, food that vegetarians can't eat, and food that everyone can eat. Then, if it's a food type you can eat, picking it up merges it in inventory, and if it isn't something you can eat, you just can't pick it up.

Also the game should preserve all the food names internally so that when you do finally eat them you get the correct message.

[duvessa]

I would prefer to keep the distinction between food that carnivores can't eat, food that vegetarians can't eat, and food that everyone can eat.

y tho

[Rast]

y tho

For

Spoiler: show

flavor

Seriously though, if food and hunger costs are going to matter, we should keep the element of some races hungering at different rates and some races gaining less nutrition from floorgod.

We could also remove food.

[duvessa]

Seriously though, if food and hunger costs are going to matter, we should keep the element of some races hungering at different rates and some races gaining less nutrition from floorgod.

but y tho? if there's going to be a clock, it's a lot easier to use the same clock for every race, instead of making it faster for some races and slower for some others

[Rast]

Food doesn't have to be a clock, it can be more of a limited strategic resource. Limits how much you can cast high level spells without pumping int and spellcasting. Used to limit rod usage. I know this is thin, but I'm trying to come up with something other than "remove food".


OK, how about this: Remove starvation death and fainting, keep the other penalties for starving, and also inflict Slow Healing 2 when starving. On the flip side, grant a regen bonus when satiated or above.

[kuniqs]

Replace all permafood with pizza.

[Factorialite]

Replace all permafood with pizza.

Definitely. Even gets around the veggie problem, as the standard pizza is cheese, but some portion of them have sausage/pepperoni on them. When a Spriggan goes up to a pizza, they pick of the pieces of meat and get fewer rations because of it.

[Elitist]

Replace all permafood with pizza.

Definitely. Even gets around the veggie problem, as the standard pizza is cheese, but some portion of them have sausage/pepperoni on them. When a Spriggan goes up to a pizza, they pick of the pieces of meat and get fewer rations because of it.

DAMN it, I miss pizza.

[damerell]

OK, how about this: Remove starvation death and fainting, keep the other penalties for starving, and also inflict Slow Healing 2 when starving. On the flip side, grant a regen bonus when satiated or above.

This is more or less what POWDER does, but additionally one of the gods disapproves of eating corpses when not hungry.

[Shtopit]

Rereading this discussion, if food were goldified, it would be nice if it also were consumed directly.

To better explain: right now, your belly has to get hungry, very hungry, very very hungry, and so on. Then you eat the food. So your hunger metre and your food metre (the quantity of food in your inventory) are two separate things.
If food were goldified, however, the hunger metre could be removed. Instead, you would have a "food bar" (that can be just a number) growing shorter as time passes, according to the actions you perform, and which is increased when you collect more food.
The advantages in would be evident in fluidity. Now that there are no respawns, you could travel without interruptions when going to an item or leaving swamp for e.g. vaults.
Species with fast metabolism would see the food number decrease faster, without being forced to stop and eat.
You would keep stuff like vampirism weapons consuming nutrition to avoid them being easily swappable. Berserker would also take nutrition, as spells and god abilities.
If it's important to keep permanent food separate from chunks, you could have two numbers, one with rations and one with chunks.
Ghouls could have an ability to sacrifice some nutrition for HP, instead of eating from inventory.

To increase fluidity even more, you could make killed natural enemies immediately drop the chunks in your inventory. This would of course create some problems with necromancers, who wouldn't have to choose between food and servants (or miasma) any more.

[Blobbo]

This would of course create some problems with necromancers, who wouldn't have to choose between food and servants (or miasma) any more.

Food is an annoyance, an ally is a tactical asset. So basically the choice to animate or butcher is just a question of whether you're solid enough tactically to not care about whether you get one more ally, or not. I'm not sure if it's a meaningful gameplay choice, the only time you'd butcher would be when you pretty much don't care if the corpse is there or not.

[svendre]

Yes, please make all food a single item, to alleviate inventory annoyance.

Alternatively, have as many types of food as anyone wants, if it's goldified out of inventory.

[Siegurt]

I think Fedhas abilities shouldn't use food at all with this change - the nutrition you got from fruits was insignificantly small, it was never a real trade-off. Functionally, fruits were an item that you only used for Fedhas abilities and weren't useful for anything else. And it's not really going to become an interesting tradeoff, since losing permafood either does nothing or outright kills you, and the latter wouldn't even happen much because you only need permafood about 5 times per game even if you're playing clumsily.
If growth and oklobs need a more permanent cost than piety (not really convinced they do, especially growth; it's mushrooms that need a nerf), perhaps they could inflict rotting, flavoured as using some of your own life force to make/upgrade the plants?

Or we could have Fedhas abilities still consume fruit, which would generate exactly as much as it did previously, and we could just make fruit a non-edible item, something that's only useful if you worship fedhas, If you really wanted to, you could bikeshed it as well, but I think that's the simplest possible solution.

[Fingolfin]

Yes, please make all food a single item, to alleviate inventory annoyance.

Alternatively, have as many types of food as anyone wants, if it's goldified out of inventory.

I read this "bring back pizza !"

[Blomdor]

I would personally love to see this implemented. Every time the game brings up a menu when I am finally forced to press "e," as if it actually matters whether I consume a bread or a meat ration to make the game stop shouting at me that I need to eat something "NOOOWWWWwwwww!!!!!!1!1!", I want to cringe. If we must keep food around as some kind of classical roguelike fossil, we can at least make it less annoying. It also frees up inventory space for items that actually do something.

Seriously, that "You need to eat something NOW!!" message annoys me to no end. It must be the caps or something. Like it's pretending that this is actually an issue, at all, ever, when it's absolutely not, and it feels like a tiny invisible goblin poking you in the eyes with a stick until you massage the "e" button...

[mattlistener]

Auto-eat permafood as startup option. Automation always picks from the food stack that is the least nutrition away from creating an empty inventory slot.

If food's being kept in the game, of course.