Remove food (split from {Hunger} is tedious)


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Post Sunday, 19th January 2014, 23:24

Remove food (split from {Hunger} is tedious)

Is removing hunger clocks & food in general and fixing anything effected in others ways(piety instead of fruit for Fedhas, etc.) too far out there?

(If this is looking at the topic too macro-ly, sorry, feel free to delete/split the post.
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Post Sunday, 19th January 2014, 23:46

Re: {Hunger} is tedious

Klown wrote:Is removing hunger clocks & food in general and fixing anything effected in others ways(piety instead of fruit for Fedhas, etc.) too far out there?


Too much of crawl is balanced around food. Foodlessnesss can work in a Roguelike, but it would require a top-to-bottom redesign of crawl.

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Post Monday, 20th January 2014, 02:34

Re: {Hunger} is tedious

brendan wrote:
Klown wrote:Is removing hunger clocks & food in general and fixing anything effected in others ways(piety instead of fruit for Fedhas, etc.) too far out there?


Too much of crawl is balanced around food. Foodlessnesss can work in a Roguelike, but it would require a top-to-bottom redesign of crawl.

I realize you are a dev and maybe you have some insight I don't, but don't most hunger producing mechanics have other limiting mechanics in place? (Mana for spells, charges for rods, piety for god powers, OOD mobs for stalling, nothing for pacification) Can spells really be considered hunger-bound when staff of energy and djinn exist and aren't super gamebreaking? You would get piety with corpse saccing gods faster, though maybe without the butchering/saccing tradeoff they could just give piety on kills, adjusting the rate as to keep things consistent with how they are now? Early berserk would be really strong but it kind of already is.

Spriggans and Healers are definitely balanced around hunger but is anything else that fundamental there that I'm missing?

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Post Monday, 20th January 2014, 07:12

Re: {Hunger} is tedious

johlstei wrote:
brendan wrote:
Klown wrote:Is removing hunger clocks & food in general and fixing anything effected in others ways(piety instead of fruit for Fedhas, etc.) too far out there?


Too much of crawl is balanced around food. Foodlessnesss can work in a Roguelike, but it would require a top-to-bottom redesign of crawl.

I realize you are a dev and maybe you have some insight I don't, but don't most hunger producing mechanics have other limiting mechanics in place? (Mana for spells, charges for rods, piety for god powers, OOD mobs for stalling, nothing for pacification) Can spells really be considered hunger-bound when staff of energy and djinn exist and aren't super gamebreaking? You would get piety with corpse saccing gods faster, though maybe without the butchering/saccing tradeoff they could just give piety on kills, adjusting the rate as to keep things consistent with how they are now? Early berserk would be really strong but it kind of already is.

Spriggans and Healers are definitely balanced around hunger but is anything else that fundamental there that I'm missing?


Without hunger I would take every single fight hasted and then wait out the contamination. Of explore in ivis only. Or kill rats with firestorm, while hasted and channeling all the time. Basically see mummies and DjBe.

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Post Monday, 20th January 2014, 07:28

Re: {Hunger} is tedious

It depends on how early you get haste but one can already haste on every fight and wait out the contamination if they want, I don't think that's particularly food limited. Invisibility I don't know enough about to make a judgement on, though spriggan stabbers would certain benefit a lot.

I don't know why you'd firestorm a rat since there could be other scarier stuff behind it and now you are marginally behind on mana for no reason. I wouldn't firestorm every rat just because I was holding staff of energy.

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Post Monday, 20th January 2014, 07:44

Re: {Hunger} is tedious

There are a few things that no-hunger-ever allows for abusing, even if in practice these aren't done often (they are also often "balanced" by tedium). These are just some ideas that have popped into my head; I'm not looking for ways to abuse hungerless characters since I don't even play mummies.

1) Once you find Temple you can "mummystab" enemies pretty freely. As in, you can wake up an enemy, draw it near a staircase, then take that staircase. Then you go to temple and wait a few thousand turns in temple (it's important you do this in temple since it has no monster gen; alternatively see below). Then you go back and the enemy will be asleep.

2) In lair in particular, and in several other places in crawl also, "out of depth" generation is laughable because there simply aren't dangerous enemies to select from. There is an exceedingly small chance of generating a fire crab, I think, and maybe a few other things I've never actually seen generate in lair (and I've waited out god wrath a few times in lair, so this isn't pure speculation). So once a mummy reaches lair, that player can freely spend 20k+ turns on each floor of lair to gain lower-risk xp than venturing elsewhere in the game. (Hunger actually doesn't do a great job of discouraging this though, since lair enemies leave lots of edible corpses as long as you have rpois.)

3) Waiting out god wrath. This speaks to a larger problem with how god wrath works in general though.

There are probably more things! You might note that all of these are weird things that a "normal" player of crawl would never do. That's why you don't notice hunger in normal gameplay.

As an aside, the lack of hunger existing in DoomRL leads to some strange behaviour there. It additionally has no monster generation past the initial level being created, so the safest way to handle most floors is to find a good location, then just wait for thousands of turns for enemies to wander into los so you can shoot them. You are ensured first action (a very big deal in DoomRL) since the enemy moved into your los, as opposed to you moving into the enemy los. It is possible that adopting a strategy like this would even be beneficial in crawl if hunger didn't exist, though obviously the fact that monsters do generate over time in crawl means that it's not obvious. I'm not suggesting that DoomRL would be a better game with hunger, but it makes for an interesting way to look at what you can do when you have no time limit of any sort.

There are certainly ways to improve how crawl uses food, but I would not be in favor of removing it entirely.

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Post Monday, 20th January 2014, 09:11

Re: {Hunger} is tedious

onton wrote:djinn exist and aren't super gamebreaking?

Dj has a contamination cost to replace the food cost (like in crawl light). It was designed to test out the idea and I don't think it's an improvement.
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Post Monday, 20th January 2014, 11:14

Re: Remove food (split from {Hunger} is tedious)

I don't think food really prevents any of those tactics. At best it just eventually stops you from doing them, but I think you could easily mummystab most hard enemies already, for instance, considering it would cost one of your dozen rations or something.

I also don't really accept the validity of the DoomRL comparison, having monsters walk into your LoS is a much bigger advantage there. In addition, in DoomRL alll monsters will eventually end up charging you after a certain number of turns, while in Crawl you'd probably encounter massive OoD spawning before you'd fought most of the level.
Last edited by Leafsnail on Monday, 20th January 2014, 15:56, edited 1 time in total.

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Post Monday, 20th January 2014, 15:18

Re: Remove food (split from {Hunger} is tedious)

You got the out of depth to prevent staying on a level too long.
Most situations hunger is just there being annoying and making you eat chunks all the time.
The abuse stuff could be looked at and hopefully minor tweaks could help limit their effectiveness.

The main part is changing things like
high piety oklobs instead of fruit(same for the growth or whatever it is).
Longer exh/slow for berserk.
Minor balance changes to Spriggans/Trolls maybe. Buff Mummies!


Ghouls/Vampires would keep their rot/thirst since their whole design is around that stuff. Chunks stick around for god prayer anyways, so yeah.

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