gammafunk wrote:For the branch in general, we're still mulling over what option to pursue. The core thing we have to decide is if we want to change how food works in the long term. Moving to floor-only food drops and removing spell/ability hunger (food usage only to prevent scummy behavior) is one direction. This direction could possibly lead to the removal of food at some point, but even if not the role of food would be reduced. A different direction would be to retain both monster and floor food drops but have more meaningful, possibly more pervasive use of food costs (BEWARE!). If we don't really want to change the way food works, we'll likely go with either a tweaked version of what's in chunkless now or a "chunk-lite" branch that neil has proposed, which is a simplification of the current chunk food system. PleasingFungus has outlined the three approaches that have been talked about, and I summarized the issues with deciding what to do with food/chunks, both in CRD emails. So as reaver said, we're working in it, and regardless of what overall change we make to food, we'll certainly have to handle food generation rates, the relevant configuration options, and possibly make other interface changes before we're done.
Good to know that all these considerations are on the table.
I don't know what Neil's proposal is exactly, but if the Simulacrum change is set in stone, I'd probably do this:
Eliminate the distinction between clean and contaminated chunks (modified nutrition value can be whatever).
Eliminate species distinctions for chunks.
Poisonous chunks can only be eaten by species with innate poison immunity or some specific dietary mutation (equipment doesn't help).
Chunks don't rot; they simply disappear (either when they normally would have rotted, or at some point in between the rotting and vanishing timer).
Ghouls heal from all chunks as though they were rotted.
Pressing 'c' once automatically butchers the single most valuable corpse on the tile without confirmation.
That solves almost all of the interface issues (minus the need to hit C occasionally, but it gets rid of the annoying stream of individual prompts for corpse stacks) while having virtually no impact on nutrition as a mechanic. Really Simulacrum is the only thing standing in the way of doing the vast majority of that (and Saprovore to a minor extent, but that's no great loss...you could even simulate it by making chunks disappear slower if you wanted to).