Food types in general

[pubby]

This was started because "problems with fruit": viewtopic.php?f=8&t=5576

While we're at it, can we make all these different food items take up only one slot in your inventory?

Is this a good idea? How can we improve food types in general?

Here's my idea (based off of mad's idea in the other thread):

There are only 3 generic types of food in the inventory: fruit, rations, and meat, corresponding to herbivore, omnivore, and carnivore respectively. Special foods like royal jellies and ambrosia get their own spot.

The types of food only exist on the floor - once you pick them up they get placed into their corresponding slot. This allows vaults such as the rats guarding cheese to retain their flavor. Food would have a value corresponding to the number of generic units derived from their previous nutrition value. For instance, meat rations would grant 5 meat units while bananas would only grant 1 fruit unit.

The rations inventory slot refers to omnivore food (honeycomb, cheese, pizza) because I can't think of a better name. Bread rations would be removed and meat rations would be renamed to "meat steak" to avoid confusion.

I'm not really sure how to handle chunks, although then again I'm not so sure we really need chunks in the game.

[Jabberwocky]

Meat steak sounds like it would rot.

[jaega1]

The question is how eating would actually work in this case. If a meat ration is 5 food then do you have to manually tell the game to eat five times in order to get full? I already hate it when I have to eat grapes because I have tell the game to eat each individual grape and that is extremely tedious.

[cerebovssquire]

0 27 e x

= eat 27 of the item in slot x

[Roderic]

Bread rations would be removed and meat rations would be renamed to "meat steak" to avoid confusion.

Why remove bread? For herbivores it's the equivalent to meat rations.

[One-Eyed Jack]

So, interface-wise, it could be that when you pick up a food item it would be like.

You pick up the filet mignon (+5 meat).
or
You pick up the honeycomb (+4 vegetarian).
or
You pick up the choko (+3 fruit).

In your inventory you would have five food slots:

a - 56 meat rations
b - 48 herb rations
c - 39 fruits
d - 4 ambrosiae
e - 3 royal jellies

trying to eat a, b, or c would prompt "how many?" which you could also specify by e -> # -> a/b/c. Consuming one unit of food takes 1 aut and displays a message corresponding to food that you've already picked up (you start/continue to eat the filet mignon until its 5 units are exhausted, then switch to the next foodstuff).

[sardonica]

Mmm, love eating some delicious 'meat unit.'

[One-Eyed Jack]

This would actually increase the number of potential types of food because you could have 100 different varieties of meat ration with different names without introducing annoying interface problems..

[cerebovssquire]

Is this just me or are royal jellies completely superfluous? Statrot is already nonthreatening in most cases, and if it removing royal jellies turns out to be a problem we can always increase !restab spawn rate slightly. Otherwise they are basically rations. Ambrosia at least has a unique effect (MP over time + confusion).
Or the effect could be made unique by removing the potion. I think this is an inferior choice though because royal jellies mainly spawn in vaults right now.

[pubby]

Meat steak sounds like it would rot.

All food found in Crawl rots IRL.

Bread rations would be removed and meat rations would be renamed to "meat steak" to avoid confusion.

Why remove bread? For herbivores it's the equivalent to meat rations.

Because it isn't a fruit. I suppose it could stay if it became omnivore food.

trying to eat a, b, or c would prompt "how many?" which you could also specify by e -> # -> a/b/c. Consuming one unit of food takes 1 aut

I don't know why the e -> # isn't already implemented but it should be. Using 0 27 e always breaks webtiles for me so I don't use it much, but it's more keystrokes anyways.

and displays a message corresponding to food that you've already picked up (you start/continue to eat the filet mignon until its 5 units are exhausted, then switch to the next foodstuff)

Adding metadata like this seems too complex to be worthwhile.

Is this just me or are royal jellies completely superfluous? Statrot is already nonthreatening in most cases, and if it removing royal jellies turns out to be a problem we can always increase !restab spawn rate slightly. Otherwise they are basically rations. Ambrosia at least has a unique effect (MP over time + confusion).

We can't remove royal jellies without ruining the humor of TRJ. Give royal jellies regeneration+slowing or something?

Mmm, love eating some delicious 'meat unit.'

'Meat unit' is jargon I stole from the fast food industry.

[Grimm]

Food would have a value corresponding to the number of generic units derived from their previous nutrition value. For instance, meat rations would grant 5 meat units while bananas would only grant 1 fruit unit.

One problem here is that the nutrition value of food varies wildly according to player race, mutations, gourmand, etc. I once wanted to include the nutrition value in food descriptions (because I don't like the fact that it's impossible to tell whether a banana is more nutritious than a pear ingame), but gave it up because of this issue.

[twelwe]

I looked at bread and meat rations, and thought if one had to go, it would be the meat ration. Only rank 3 carnivores are unable to eat bread rations, and only rank 3 herbivores are unable to eat meat rations. The difference is that carnivores can rely on chunks to make up for the loss of meat rations, while the removal of the bread ration would leave herbivores with honeycombs as their best current source of nutrition, and at current drop rates that is not sufficient. That leaves Royal Jelly, Bread Ration, Ambrosia, Honeycomb, Snozzcumber, Slice of Pizza, Sausage, Apple, Choko, Sultana. Three of those ten have special effects (honeycomb is fast nutrition, royal jelly cures statrot, ambrosia gives mana) and gives food in general a maximum of ten slots of inventory to occupy. This might seem like a lot but it is still better than 22 potential slots. I don't think food is special enough to have rune of zot style inventory treatment, and this one slot system doesn't seem good for fedhas. Consolidating fruit into one slot still ignores the fact that some fruit provides more nutrition than others but have the exact same value to fedhas, and the idea that eating two times from your fruit pile and get different nutrition from each time (you finish your apples, say, and move on to sultanas) would come off as very confusing to players.

[XuaXua]

With this proposal I'd really hate to lose my precious "bee vomit" food slot.

[jejorda2]

What if eating always caused you to eat until you reach the next satiation level, unless you are interrupted? Who really wants to worry about how many pieces of food to eat?

[danharaj]

Is this just me or are royal jellies completely superfluous? Statrot is already nonthreatening in most cases, and if it removing royal jellies turns out to be a problem we can always increase !restab spawn rate slightly. Otherwise they are basically rations. Ambrosia at least has a unique effect (MP over time + confusion).
Or the effect could be made unique by removing the potion. I think this is an inferior choice though because royal jellies mainly spawn in vaults right now.

In one of the diesel robins a zig raiding character had pretty severe stat rot without any !restore, so it used acquirement to get royal jellies.

[Deimos]

I was also saved from death in the Abyss by Royal Jellies. Brainless, all my pots burned from lack of conservation, was about to give in until I saw ye olde jelly.

They might be a bit superfluous for most playthroughs, though.

[Psieye]

Food would have a value corresponding to the number of generic units derived from their previous nutrition value. For instance, meat rations would grant 5 meat units while bananas would only grant 1 fruit unit.

One problem here is that the nutrition value of food varies wildly according to player race, mutations, gourmand, etc. I once wanted to include the nutrition value in food descriptions (because I don't like the fact that it's impossible to tell whether a banana is more nutritious than a pear ingame), but gave it up because of this issue.

This brings forth the question: is there a need for different fruit to have slightly different nutrition values? I don't think anything would be lost if functionally, (non-special) permafood was boiled down to:

  Code:

Small/Medium/Large Vegetarian unit
Medium/Large Omnivore unit
Medium/Large Carnivore unit


Where "non-special" means "royal jelly and ambrosia not included". "Functionally" means the food could have different names while on the floor and the flavour text could be varied too, but each [size]+[diet] type of unit would all occupy one inventory slot each.

The questionable next step would then be to boil it even further down to "one-size-fits-all" units. This would allow characters to essentially "eat half a loaf of bread and put the rest away for later because they got interrupted" and "shove a mouthful of grapes into their mouth all at once". How attached are we to the concept of "big meals take several turns to eat, you can't cancel it if attacked"? And to the Fedhas concept of "one tiny sultana is just as good as a big apple to grow this plant"?

[omegasean]

Meat steak sounds like it would rot.

Salted pork in a cold dungeon.

most players die within 2 hours ?

haha, nah no time for rotting.

[Jabberwocky]

Crawl time =/= real time.

[tasonir]

I was also saved from death in the Abyss by Royal Jellies. Brainless, all my pots burned from lack of conservation, was about to give in until I saw ye olde jelly.

They might be a bit superfluous for most playthroughs, though.

They also tend to be rather important to deep dwarves, who cannot regenerate their stats...