Discussion: Food and Its Positives/Negatives

[Tiktacy]

I think a lot of players feel very strongly about the subject of food being in the game, so naturally I figured this would be a good choice for a discussion. Just something to keep in mind: be respectful to the devs, this is one of those topics that can get heated so I just want everyone to be doubly sure that they are following the rules of the forum and being considerate towards the developers who take the time to communicate with their player base.

Discussion Questions:

Do you feel as though the current food system has a positive or a negative impact on your enjoyment of the game? Or is there no real noticeable effect on the enjoyment of the game?

If food were to be removed, how would you adjust the current game to avoid too much change in terms of balance? (if at all)

What improvements to the current food system, if any, do you believe could help improve the game as a whole?

My Thoughts:

In general, I believe food is just fine as it is. I think the devs have done a remarkable job at improving it since the days of the very appropriately titled "Nausea" (makes me sick just thinking about it). In my mind, food exists as a limiting factor and to discourage tedious behavior by having certain aspects of the game limited through requiring continued exploration by the player. As long as it isn't unpleasant and doesn't create any tediousness of its own, then I think its worth staying. In its current form, I think it fits very nicely into crawl. I think the devs deserve a big pat on the back for this one too, I used to be extremely anti-food, but there have been quite a few improvements that have made it much more tolerable, and I'm happy that they stuck with it despite all the backlash from the player base.

Again, I don't feel like food is tedious in its current form. It sort of creates a bit of a mini-game the player has to deal with, but its not the bad kind of minigame. Its often times a hunt of sorts, there is often a feeling of satisfaction I have when I am near starving and manage butcher 6 chunks off of a yakataur(even if it is pretty minor). I think it would be sad to see it go, but if it were to go then I would probably replace it with a system that causes the player to slowly lose experience over time if they have not killed anything of significance in order to encourage players to continue challenging themselves in deeper portions of the dungeon rather than fuck around in slime pits for an hour killing wimpy slimes for marginal experience gain.

I don't really have any complaints about the current food system, but as far as improvements go, I think removing jerky and pizza from the game is a good idea, fruit already fill the bill on "quick snacks" and jerky/pizza just take up annoying amounts of inventory slots. Also, royal jelly(food) should be removed, its just as weird to have extra high tier foods. 3 slots maximum for food, thats what I imagine in a perfect world.

[archaeo]

The last really big food discussion was my food removal thread, for what it's worth, and I still agree with the basic thrust of my OP if not all the specifics. Food should go. It's inelegant, tedious, and kludgy in every place that it makes an appearance in Crawl's mechanics.

Full food removal doesn't seem to be on the table, so it's academic. At one point, gammafunk and Lasty both discussed removing most hunger costs, removing chunks, and keeping the system as a more-or-less pure clock. I don't know if that's still on the table, but it would be preferable to the status quo, which is basically a broken parking meter that also happens to be tied together with half the mechanics in the game and still doesn't actually limit anything except severely suboptimal play.

I'll leave it at that though, the last food removal thread went 292 posts in part because of my own stubbornness on this issue and I don't think I'm really helping my case!

[johlstei]

I don't like how the same system has to be tuned for both strategic (pushing the player forward) and tactical (limiting use of spells, abilities, berserk, etc) concerns. Having to make compromises between the two is quite unfortunate because if they had just been two different mechanics to begin with, they could be tuned independently.

I think the strategic/clock *effect* works well. It means you don't have tactics like "wait for a thousand turns for monsters to come into view". However, I really dislike the implementation that involves hitting c over corpses. "go find a corpse" really breaks up the flow of the game for me - the optimal thing is pretty obvious but I have to hit a bunch of buttons to get there. If there were no tactical concerns, you could just give satiation on kills and it would be a fine system entirely, but as it is, it's still feels like an interruption to the fun of playing crawl.

I don't know what I think about the tactical stuff - most things feel limited by something other than food. Either way, I think splitting up these two systems would be a great intermediate step - call the tactical one 'thirst' instead. This would allow them to be tuned independently - suddenly melee characters and magic characters are both pushed forward by the clock at the same rate, so maybe it can be tuned so the former notices it sometimes without screwing the latter. It would also let us get rid of butchering, since the clock aspect no longer has to support stuff like eating permafood to have extra spell hunger buffer - that'd be thirst's domain.

[ydeve]

I agree with archaeo. It's annoying to eat chunks, the tactical cost shouldn't be tied to the strategic one, and the strategic one is broken. See the last big thread for details. And there are much better/more interesting strategic clocks than the threat of instantly starving to death due to food. IE OoD monsters, gradual hell effects, or something like ADOM's mutation/corruption system.

[Sprucery]

What improvements to the current food system, if any, do you believe could help improve the game as a whole?

Goldify chunks (take no inventory space) and make them automatically appear in your chunk slot when you kill something that leaves a corpse.

Corpses can stay as they are for Animate Dead/Animate Skeleton/Cigotuvi's Embrace/Twisted Resurrection (enemy)/Fedhas/hides. You just can't get chunks out of them.

[johlstei]

What improvements to the current food system, if any, do you believe could help improve the game as a whole?

Goldify chunks (take no inventory space) and make them automatically appear in your chunk slot when you kill something that leaves a corpse.

Corpses can stay as they are for Animate Dead/Animate Skeleton/Cigotuvi's Embrace/Twisted Resurrection (enemy)/Fedhas/hides. You just can't get chunks out of them.

TBH, as far as easy changes go, this would probably address my concerns sufficiently to never post about food again.

[Siegurt]

What improvements to the current food system, if any, do you believe could help improve the game as a whole?

Goldify chunks (take no inventory space) and make them automatically appear in your chunk slot when you kill something that leaves a corpse.

Corpses can stay as they are for Animate Dead/Animate Skeleton/Cigotuvi's Embrace/Twisted Resurrection (enemy)/Fedhas/hides. You just can't get chunks out of them.

TBH, as far as easy changes go, this would probably address my concerns sufficiently to never post about food again.

See, I don't get why this is even a concern, I never carry any chunks with me at all, if I'm hungry, and there's a corpse nearby, and I don't need it urgently for some other corpse-y purpose, I butcher it, eat whatever will fit in my stomach, and move on.

What if chunks were entirely un-carryable, and 'c' just had you eat your fill leaving no physical items for you to obsess over behind?

[archaeo]

Goldify chunks (take no inventory space) and make them automatically appear in your chunk slot when you kill something that leaves a corpse.

What if chunks were entirely un-carryable, and 'c' just had you eat your fill leaving no physical items for you to obsess over behind?

I can't help but point out that both of these solutions follow permafood-only iterations of the mechanic down the slippery slope of simplifying food to the point that it will inevitably be automated away, at which point the whole "food" flavor stops being purposeful.

[ydeve]

Goldify chunks (take no inventory space) and make them automatically appear in your chunk slot when you kill something that leaves a corpse.

What if chunks were entirely un-carryable, and 'c' just had you eat your fill leaving no physical items for you to obsess over behind?

I can't help but point out that both of these solutions follow permafood-only iterations of the mechanic down the slippery slope of simplifying food to the point that it will inevitably be automated away, at which point the whole "food" flavor stops being purposeful.

Good. Maybe then it'll be removed.

[Siegurt]

What if chunks were entirely un-carryable, and 'c' just had you eat your fill leaving no physical items for you to obsess over behind?

I can't help but point out that both of these solutions follow permafood-only iterations of the mechanic down the slippery slope of simplifying food to the point that it will inevitably be automated away, at which point the whole "food" flavor stops being purposeful.

Well, there's two distinct things we're talking about here, "Satiation" the points-based limiting mechanic, and "Food" the item-related thing that gives you more points in "Satiation"

How one gains points in Satiation (and how tedious/easy/hard/automated it is) has little to do with whether Satiation points are a good limiting mechanic, one can talk about proposals that address one without really impacting the other, or proposals that address both.

Simplifying the gaining of satiation points in terms of interface (rather than changing the overall game balance by making it much easier or harder to actually gain points in satiation) is something that is unrelated to whether the limiting mechanic itself is good or bad.

I guess one could argue that if we remove all the item parts of food, that calling it 'Food' and 'Satiation' is completely irrelevant (You could call it 'energy' or 'motivation' or even 'fluffiness' if you were so inclined with the same impact) However I'm not proposing the removal of all food, I'm not even proposing we change the balance of how food relates to killing, dropping corpses, and finding things on the floor, I'm just suggesting that we remove the temptation to pick up and carry around what amounts to a useless item 99% of the time.

[ydeve]

Just goldify the chunks. The only difference between goldification and satiation-from-corpses that I can think of is goldification doesn't nerf channeling.

[HardboiledGargoyle]

BTW, FWIW chunks are goldified in the dcss-ca fork FYI

[tabstorm]

Food is bad, just remove it already. There's no reason to keep it in the game except nostalgia for roguelike traditions (which are often bad), desire for layers of fake complexity to give the feel of a challenge (which are bad), and balance concerns (which are nonsense).

[Shard1697]

Food is bad, just remove it already. There's no reason to keep it in the game except nostalgia for roguelike traditions (which are often bad), desire for layers of fake complexity to give the feel of a challenge (which are bad), and balance concerns (which are nonsense).

Yep. Food does not present a meaningful challenge or balancing factor at any point as any race. I don't really care if I'm playing as an orc or an elf or a troll or a spriggan, it at most changes how much I press c(well, f, but that's because I play on a laptop and rebound everything). Ghouls can either still have chunks of meat which only do something for them, or just gain back rotted HP on kill, vampires can have potions of blood drop from enemies.

Everywhere else, remove food, please. There are no positives to food-only races which are theoretically built around it holding us back from removing it, but it doesn't affect their balance much in practice and they could easily be changed themselves. Remember when orcs were able to eat unclean meat without getting nauseous? I don't think there's a reason to miss that, orcs are still good without it(and the game is better without nausea).

[Ratboiler]

The only time i've found food is a real challenge is early game when you take Gozag as god on D2-D4 and didn't find that much food yet. At that point it can become tedious not to starve (since corpses no longer drop, but drop gold).

Also what would happen to mutagenic chunks? They can be very fun early game .

[RBrandon]

Food causes some awful inventory annoyances as well. I can't help but wonder how incredibly often I get the "inventory is full, shall I ignore this" prompt from one of SIX types of food available for a normal character. Having six items do the same thing, especially when that thing isn't very interesting, is good design.

[Jarlyk]

Here's a concrete proposal (for a dungeon without food):

1. Increase the scale of MP so that there is more granularity. I'm thinking a flat 10x current value. All spell costs increase by the same scale. The increased granularity allows for some tuning of this proposal. Incidentally, this scales MP to be closer to HP in its magnitude range.

2. When you cast a spell, you increase a Magical Exhaustion (henceforth called ME) value under the hood.

2a. The amount of increase is tied to the equivalent of the current 'hunger' spell rating; in particular, this means casting a 'hungerless' spell does not increase your ME.

2b. The MP cost of spells increases based on the current ME. This also scales with the spell 'hunger' rating, so 'hungerless' spells never go up in cost and high level spells increase in cost rapidly.

2c. The intention of this is that spamming a high level spell repeatedly can quickly use up your MP reserves, whereas careful tactical use of lower 'hunger' spells can let you stretch out your MP further. Incidentally, this should also increase the value of the 'hunger reduction' component of training Spellcasting.

3. ME decays over time automatically.

4. Channeling increases ME and also regains more MP than it does currently. The idea is that you initially have a net gain in your effective MP, but repeated channeling eventually gives diminishing returns, because you're making your spells more and more expensive the longer you do it. Incidentally, this adds a penalty to using channeling for 'accelerated resting', since it makes you more tactically vulnerable (less total effective MP) if you get into a fight right away.

5. If you really want rods to interact with spells, you can have them increase ME, but honestly I don't see any reason to. Just let rods be spammed without penalty and rely on charges to constrain them.

6. Ignore the strategic clock aspect of hunger; it's essentially irrelevant. Add a different kind of clock if one is desired.

7. The species interactions with hunger can instead be reworked as increased/decreased/removed ME effects.

8. I don't know how you change the hunger interaction with Gozag. Probably just reduce later-game gold gain slightly to compensate for the food shops you might've needed to purchase.

9. God abilities that use hunger instead increase ME. Ability costs scale with ME (this makes it relevant for melee characters using MP-based god abilities without much MP.)

10. UI: If the increased MP cost is too opaque for new users, can include a new "MExh" status display that changes in color like Contam to indicate the underlying level of ME. The hunger bar for spells is re-titled "Exhaustion".

[ydeve]

5. If you really want rods to interact with spells, you can have them increase ME, but honestly I don't see any reason to. Just let rods be spammed without penalty and rely on charges to constrain them.

Why not do this with spells as well. MP already puts a meaningful constraint on the spamability of spells

[Jarlyk]

5. If you really want rods to interact with spells, you can have them increase ME, but honestly I don't see any reason to. Just let rods be spammed without penalty and rely on charges to constrain them.

Why not do this with spells as well. MP already puts a meaningful constraint on the spamability of spells

Yeah, perhaps MP by itself is enough. I think part of the intention of spell hunger, though, was that there is some additional penalty for high-level spells unless you train Spellcasting to reduce spell hunger. In practice, this is rarely a consideration (at most, it means you occasionally have to spend a turn in combat eating some fast food), but it's a mechanic that could, in principle, add some tactical depth. What appeals to me about escalating MP costs is that it's a passive effect (no chopping, eating or inventory tedium), while at the same time hopefully having a more meaningful impact on spell-based tactics than spell hunger did. The primary result of spell hunger currently is that it causes newer players to over-train Spellcasting; that's not a very interesting result for a mechanic.

[archaeo]

8. I don't know how you change the hunger interaction with Gozag.

Instead of making Gozag revolve around the denial of corpses, make it revolve around the denial of monster-carried loot? Everything a monster carries is turned into gold?

This is a tough one; Gozag would need to be substantially redesigned in a Crawl without chunks, and I feel that even if the devs aren't on board with foodless Crawl, it wasn't so long ago that they were interested in trying to figure out chunkless Crawl. Maybe your pricing solution would be enough.

Yeah, perhaps MP by itself is enough. I think part of the intention of spell hunger, though, was that there is some additional penalty for high-level spells unless you train Spellcasting to reduce spell hunger. In practice, this is rarely a consideration (at most, it means you occasionally have to spend a turn in combat eating some fast food), but it's a mechanic that could, in principle, add some tactical depth.

As I understand it, the only place in the game where hunger is supposed to create tactical depth is with hungry ghosts. Everywhere else, including spellcasting, it's designed to be a strategic limitation. MP is tactical; hunger is strategic.

What appeals to me about escalating MP costs is that it's a passive effect (no chopping, eating or inventory tedium), while at the same time hopefully having a more meaningful impact on spell-based tactics than spell hunger did. The primary result of spell hunger currently is that it causes newer players to over-train Spellcasting; that's not a very interesting result for a mechanic.

Setting aside the question of whether or not we really need a strategic limitation on spellcasting, your "ME" idea probably is a little too opaque. It would be a lot cleaner to just replace hunger costs with int draining, which would be much easier to communicate to the player while remaining equally passive.

Of course, rather than letting players do something but punishing them for it, we could just make it impossible for players to do that thing. If spamming high-level spells too early is such a problem, why can players learn them so early in the first place?

[HardboiledGargoyle]

yeah the spell difficulty numbers are a little kinky in favor of highest-level spells: they are for spell levels 1-9: 3, 15, 35, 70, 100, 150, 200, 260, 330, but the pattern is simpler if they're 0, 10, 30, 60, 100, 150, 210, 280, 360.

Gozag would need to be substantially redesigned in a Crawl without chunks

Why can't Gozag stay the same in chunkless crawl, and just stop offering guaranteed food shops? What side are you on anyway.

[archaeo]

Gozag's denial of chunks in exchange for god powers and loot is mechanically interesting even if I'm not sure that it works perfectly, and I'm inclined to think that without that tradeoff, Gozag is just a way more complicated version of Okawaru. It also should go without saying that without the Midas-esque flavor, Gozag feels a bit purposeless; I know people like to give dpeg a hard time w/r/t his prioritization of flavor when it comes to his gods, but it really is a meaningful factor.

But if you want to know what side I'm on, I'd remove a dozen Gozags if it meant getting rid of food.

[dynast]

The idea is to get rid of chunks, not corpses, gozag is a god that gets rid of corpses, making half the necromancy spells useless.

[Shard1697]

I've never run into serious food issues with Gozag. There's enough permafood even without food shops, I feel like it's generally more of a flavor restriction than a meaningful mechanical one.

[Sar]

Getting rid of chunks would be a serious nerf to orb of destruction and disintegration.

[Hurkyl]

I can't help but point out that both of these solutions follow permafood-only iterations of the mechanic down the slippery slope of simplifying food to the point that it will inevitably be automated away, at which point the whole "food" flavor stops being purposeful.

One of the first generation of dungeon crawlers -- Tunnels of Doom -- had food automated away, but the flavor still made sense. You bought rations at shops (with a tight money supply) and consumed them (automatically) at a constant rate, and running low on food would push you to dive deeper to find more shops. (going up to resupply at prior shops would instead eat a lot of time out of the game's other clock)

Having to manually eating loot to survive is, I think, simply a legacy from Rogue/Nethack, not required recipe for good design and flavor. I think most games with food use it for healing or buffs.

[kuniqs]

What I know is that without chunks or food at all, Crawl would have to be redesigned and rebalanced in waaay too many places.

My only chip with food is the corpse butchering and chunk inventory minigame. It just breaks the flow.

- goldify chunks
- change dragon hides so they drop automatically when monster dies, with same % chance as with butchering
- make game add chunks to your chunk counter after you kill an eatable monster
- remove butchering

Mutagenic chunks can be special-cased, as a random drop just like hides.

[tabstorm]

What I know is that without chunks or food at all, Crawl would have to be redesigned and rebalanced in waaay too many places.

My only chip with food is the corpse butchering and chunk inventory minigame. It just breaks the flow.

- goldify chunks
- change dragon hides so they drop automatically when monster dies, with same % chance as with butchering
- make game add chunks to your chunk counter after you kill an eatable monster
- remove butchering

Mutagenic chunks can be special-cased, as a random drop just like hides.

No it wouldn't.

1. Remove all forms of hunger interaction, and remove food.
2. Remove Vampires.
3. Ghouls recover rot from killing living foes, or just get rid of the rotting feature, as it barely does anything in practice.
4. Mutagenic chunk droppers drop potions of mutation instead.

Mostly, this amounts to ignoring hunger cost concerns on spells, abilities, regen items, rods, etc.
Suggesting that "many things would need to be rebalanced" implies that hunger costs actually balance anything, or even worse, that hunger costs SHOULD balance things.

[kuniqs]

Maybe. My point is, the changes I proposed do not require major code rewrites, as far as I know. Thus, they have a much bigger chance to be implemented than removing food altogether.

[archaeo]

On the contrary, kuniqs, I can't imagine that goldifying chunks or your other proposals are really that much more trivial to implement than tabstorm's.

In any case, the problem isn't ease of implementation, but the complexity of implementation. A majority of the player's actions are impacted by hunger in some way, and a roadblock with one of them means holding up the whole reform effort. I tend to agree with tabstorm that most of that "impact" is illusory at best, but I don't know that most of the devs share this view.

One of the first generation of dungeon crawlers -- Tunnels of Doom -- had food automated away, but the flavor still made sense. You bought rations at shops (with a tight money supply) and consumed them (automatically) at a constant rate, and running low on food would push you to dive deeper to find more shops. (going up to resupply at prior shops would instead eat a lot of time out of the game's other clock)

So it wasn't really automated away, since you still ended up performing some manual action (shopping) in order to stay alive. The issue with most of the Crawl proposals I've seen is that food would happen entirely during autoexplore and resting, and you'd really never interact with it at all.

The flavor "makes sense" regardless -- if you have to have a timer, "hunger" is as good an in-game justification as any -- but automation would background food to the point that bothering to justify it seems unnecessary. At that point, we may as well find another way of justifying the fact that the game expects you to keep moving forward, or find another means to do so. I think no-hunger-costs-permafood-only crawl would be an improvement, at least, but it's still a kludgy foward-progress clock, especially since it's very difficult to make into something flexible or reactive enough that it produces an interesting level of tension across all Crawl combos and playstyles.