Dungeon Master
Posts: 388
Joined: Monday, 18th August 2014, 20:04
Hunger interface and starvation (Split from Death Cobs in CYC)
Rep Henry Clay wrote:So I just died to death cobs in Zot. I feel really really stupid for tabbing through that. I've never died to hunger before and for some stupid reason assumed their attacks wouldn't continue lowering my hunger past starving. Silly me.
Super fast death cobs stacking hunger through armor is bullshit, but maybe I'm just butthurt that I died.
From what I understand their attacks won't derease your hunger past 0. However, any action you take will lower your hunger linearly; it's sort of the same effect as torment + regular damage. Probably, it's very easy for a cob to leave your hunger at <100 or whatever and so any action besides eating will kill you in that state.
From reading crawl-dev (where they are tracking these deaths closely) it seems like many of the cob deaths involve tabbing; I suspect most players just don't know the mechanics of "starving" because it's practically never happened to them before -- I can count the number of times I've been "starving" (edit: in modern crawl) on at most two hands. And also, I suspect death cobs, because of the multiplicative effect, may tend to leave you in a lower hunger state than the usual means of entering "starving". That category is anything lower than satiation 1000. Typically you do have a few turns, I think, and the range of "starving" as a category is actually twice that of "very hungry" (though there's a hidden point at 500 where you start passing out). So people just aren't used to being in version of "starving" that can result in insta-death.
I personally think this mechanic is kind of nuts and not very fun sounding (I don't usually play trunk though so I haven't personally experienced it). I have been playing crawl long enough to remember times where starving to death was a more practical possibility (at least as a bad player back then), and it doesn't really seem like the greatest thing to return to those times. But if it's going to stay in, my suggestions to any devs who might be listening: (i) please provide some better UI guidance to the fact that "starving" can mean, if you do anything but eat you will die (which I don't think it really meant, for practical purposes, before), and (ii) consider putting a lower bound on the hungering effect at something like 1000, or maybe even 1250 (middle of "near starving").
Also, possibly consider providing better cues to how long eating takes -- I didn't know until I just looked it up that fruit/pizza/jerky is 10aut whereas everything else is 30aut (I did know that chunks are 30aut from playing ghouls). I see that it is shown in the item description, but perhaps eating a 30aut item in combat should (optionally) trigger a prompt. This means that it now can be of tactical relevance what you eat during combat, if multiple things are attacking you with a death cob. Actually I'd personally prefer it if everything took 10aut to eat, but that may not be reasonable, and it would be a substantial ghoul buff.
- For this message the author advil has received thanks: 3
- nago, Rep Henry Clay, Sandman25